MEF Board President & UMass-Amherst Dept. of Communication Chair Michael Morgan worked closely with George Gerbner when he was a researcher (1976-83) for the Cultural Indicators Project at the Annenberg School for Communication and then continued to publish with him until 2002. On January 12, 2006, MEF Managing Director Bill Yousman interviewed Morgan about his reflections on the life and work of George Gerbner. The transcript of the interviews follows.
BY: As someone who worked closely with George Gerbner how would you describe his legacy to the field of communication and media studies?
MM: There are a number of ways to answer that, it depends on where I want to start. He was not at the ground floor of the development of the discipline but the elevator was not very high up when he came in. It might have been on the first or the second floor. He was one of the first researchers, as opposed to theorists like McLuhan, who got a lot of national attention. His work was in the media, he was testifying before congress about television violence, and he headed up what is arguably the longest running project in the history of communication research. There was a lot of visibility because of the topic of violence and also because it was long term and there were periodic reports year after year after year.
He was also one of the most instrumental people in bringing many different strands together into a coherent discipline. For him from the very beginning communication was not a field, it was a discipline. And that was one of his missions-- to build communication as a distinct, coherent discipline as opposed to simply an area of study that different people looked at. Being the Dean of the Annenberg School for 25 years, starting in 1964, he was there at the start of that coalescing and that development and he played a significant and instrumental role in the development of communication as a discipline.
In addition, the research generated a great deal of interest and it generated a great deal of hostility. He was one of the first ones to say, “If nobody screams you’re not doing anything.” He didn’t expect everyone to agree with him, and he would’ve been disappointed if they had. He enjoyed the fight and the battle and the conflicts and presenting and defending his point of view. But it was a tremendous presence in the field. All strains and emergent areas since then have had to define themselves in terms of either to say we’re continuing this sort of work or we reject it and we’re doing something completely different. It was kind of a central core that everything else had to be identified in terms of. You could define yourself in opposition to it or as an extension of it but you couldn’t avoid having to deal with it.
So the legacy is one of both building communication as an academic discipline and increasing popular attention to the discipline. It’s arguable that the growth, the phenomenal growth of communication in universities across the country in the last forty years, not that it would not have happened without him, but that he played a significant role in defining it and in attracting attention to the area. And the implications of his work are going to be informing scholarship for a very long time. Cultivation and the cultural indicators model were developed in the late 1960’s. It’s forty years later and people are still publishing a lot of research in that area. It’s pretty remarkable.
BY: What do you think accounted for some of the hostility that you mentioned?
MM: There were a couple of areas of hostility. Some of it came from people who thought that academics should not be in the public sphere, that if you’re getting a lot coverage in the press and you’re appearing on television and on radio and your work is in newspapers you’re not doing real academic research, you’re kind of just doing popular stuff. So some of it may have been from people who were either jealous of the publicity or who felt it was unseemly for academics to be in the popular press. If regular people can understand it, it must not be scholarly it must be kind of just popular and trivial and superficial.
Some of it was the fact that any research can be critiqued on methodological grounds and when you’re trying to do something that everybody talks about and seems so obvious, measuring violence on a television set, there are so many hundreds of ways to do that and each one has problems, each one has limitations, each one has implications for what it covers and what it doesn’t. There’s probably nothing that is easier to attack than analyzing violence on television because of all the questions of what is violence, and what you count, and what you don’t, and how you sample it, and how you define what counts within that and what doesn’t count. Do you count comic violence? Do you count accidents? When does a violent act start and stop? These things can be debated endlessly in terms of methodological tinkering so they’re very, very easy to attack.
It’s very interesting that when the national TV violence studies were done in the late 90’s with millions of dollars from the cable industry and the broadcast networks to try and come up with an improvement over what had been the cultural indicators method, what they kept coming up with was, “Oh, I see why he did this. I see why he came up with that” because when you get down to the nitty-gritty and you try and actually operationalize in a reliable way it’s really hard to do. And you end up almost exactly where he was. They ended up reproducing, with minor modifications, what he did.
It’s meant to be very unambiguous. It’s meant to be the most overall aggregate manifest level of content and it does that very, very well. Once you try to get something that’s more qualitative and subjective you lose reliability. So on the methodological level it’s very easy to attack because it sounds like you’re doing nothing but counting in the most mindless way. But it’s also very easy to caricature too. One thing I’ve always wanted to do is a systematic analysis of cultivation in media textbooks and communications textbooks. Most of the versions you see of it tend to be oversimplified and distorted and straw issues and when it is presented that way, it’s very easy to attack.
BY: Regarding the attention and publicity, was he just a good self-promoter? Was it serendipitous? Did he just happen to do his work at a time when the overall culture was ready and interested?
MM: Well, it was a combination of things. The question of TV violence is always hot, although there are cycles. It does come and go. But the early to mid- 70’s was a time that was especially hot. In the late 60’s there were assassinations of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, there was the Eisenhower commission on the causes and prevention of violence, there was the Surgeon General studies where the government put in a lot of money, equivalent to probably fifty million dollars now or more, on studying TV violence. And it was just in the news all the time. There was a lot of concern with the country becoming too violent. There was tremendous civil unrest, crime rates were rising and television is an easy target. Not that anybody ever thought that television was the major cause of violence in society but its probably one of the more addressable causes. If it does contribute to violence it is one of the easier things to address then domestic abuse or bad schools or things like that. It’s just a lot easier.
And the print media always like negative stories about television because it makes them feel like they are a dignified, safe, medium. You always find a lot of stories in the press about how bad TV is. So there was tremendous national, public, political, parental, educational, research interest on TV violence. That’s partly the time.
On top of that, it wasn’t like we came up with the results and waited for the press to come. Quite the contrary, press releases were sent out, we actively disseminated the results of the research because it was news, it would bring attention to the project, and we knew it would be picked up. So there was an element of self-promotion or promotion of the research and promotion of the school on top of that.
He also had a great ability to come up with spiffy little memorable labels and names that sometimes oversimplified but sometimes really captured things really, really well. ‘Risk ratios’ was one – where you compare in any given group how many people commit violence to how many people are victims of it. They were always very alliterative – ‘blurring, blending, and bending’. So he had a great skill at packaging the ideas in ways that were very memorable and that encapsulated what they were. The thing I was struck by in the obituaries, they all said he’s the one who coined the phrase ‘mean world syndrome’ as if that has become part of the national discussion, which is very interesting.
So he was very good at signifying and encapsulating complex ideas in memorable terms, and there was tremendous national interest, and he was very good at knowing how to get the news out there and draw attention to it. And once you are on the rolodexes you get interviews and questions all the time. Every time we would release a report, I would get dozens and dozens of requests from newspapers and radio stations.
BY: The media world has changed a lot since Gerbner was in the thick of his research. Television is not now what it was when the networks were the only source of programming. There are other sources of entertainment that, particularly, younger people are drawn to. Although it doesn’t seem to be taking away from television, its taking away from other things. But why would you say Gerbner’s work is still relevant to media educators, scholars, and students today?
MM: The central focus in some ways is about the sources of consciousness in society and diversity of expression. On the surface it looks like a dramatic transformation since the 1970’s when we basically had three channels that everybody watched, and now when we have five hundred and we have satellite and TiVo, and DVDs. But what happened in that same time is that while channels are expanding the number of owners and production sources have shrunk so that actually fewer different companies are producing the content now than there were then.
In addition, until ten years ago it was the law of the land that the people who produced television programs are different from the people who distribute them. We thought it was a good policy to democratize the system, to have more diversity in the system. And since 1995 that law has been gone, the financial interest and syndication laws are gone. So there has been even more concentration, more conglomeration between the producers and the distributors, between the studios and the networks and the big change, really the only change, is that we are now able to watch television when we want and where we want because of technological enhancements in distribution.
But while this is giving us the illusion of technological development and high tech advancements, it is actually making it easier for programmers and advertisers to reach us twenty-four-seven and surround us with the messages, the values, the selling, the ideology, and the commercialism of the small number of people who produce the programs. So it is intensifying the control of consciousness and the penetration of media. It is increasing the penetration of the same messages, the same imagery, the same representations, the same values and ideologies wherever we are. It gives us the illusion that there is a tremendous amount of choice out there—well we have got the web. There is a tremendous amount of variety and choice and diversity available on the web but if you look at where people go, they are at the Disney website, they are at the Microsoft website, they are at the MSNBC website, they are at AOL, it is the same corporations that are dominating the web as well.
BY: Why do you think Gerbner should be considered a critical scholar?
MM: That’s a really important question. And, in fact, that is really one of his most significant contributions because unlike just about everybody else who was working on media effects or violence or attitude change, or anything related to media from any perspective at that point, he was one of the first who pointed the finger back at the system. That it wasn’t just how you learn to watch television better. It wasn’t just how you protect kids; it wasn’t just to tell parents to turn it off. It was saying that there is something wrong with the system that we have: the extent to which it is commercially controlled, the extent to which it reduces the diversity of voices, the extent to which the commercial imperatives function against the notion of democratic discourse.
This actually goes back to his dissertation from the 50’s where he developed a general model of communication, one of the first ones. It was a model that applied both to interpersonal communication and to mass communication. And central in that was the role of the State. And the role of the State in this early model was to create the conditions under which the widest variety of voices could be heard. The duty of the State is to increase diversity. And the system we have is quite the opposite. The State and the system function to reduce diversity and to diminish the opportunity for democratic discourse. So he pointed the finger back at the system and said this research has policy implications for how the media are organized, for how the government deals with the media, and its not simply just how to understand ourselves better, or research for its own sake, but it has direct implications for how the system should be structured and suggests ways for how we should make changes in the system.
The Cultural Indicators Project was one of the first times that large-scale empirical, quantitative social science research was combined with a critical outlook. It took a lot of people a long time to see that because critical research was very often seen as an alternative to empirical, experimental types of research and therefore people came to think that anything that was quantitative, anything that was scientific or empirical by definition was administrative. It took people a long time to realize that the critical commitment of a piece of research is not a function of its methodology. That research can be qualitative or quantitative or administrative or critical and one has nothing to do with the other and it’s very interesting to me to see how he is now considered to be a pioneer of critical research. I think some of that had to do with the Cultural Environment Movement and also the third stage of his career when he was doing a lot of op-ed pieces and not feeling as constrained by the data and presenting more of his opinion on things, and they were often very, very, critical about various media related issues.
BY: How would you say working with George Gerbner influenced your own life?
MM: I am not sure I would be here right now if that hadn’t happened. I had become very interested in media and television in college and I had also become very interested in social scientific research and didn’t really know about ways to combine those two things. They were both things that I found extremely fascinating and I just kind of fell into doing some really basic surveys and experiments in college in a really rudimentary way. But I found I really enjoyed doing it and I was also just obsessed and fascinated with media. I ended up at Annenberg and found that my interests were incredibly compatible, this was exactly the kind of approach that fit with the way I was thinking but didn’t have a way to formulate. I had bits and pieces but I had no thematic theoretical structure to make these pieces fall together. Gerbner’s model gave me exactly the kind of theoretical framework that I was interested in working with. We published, I don’t know how many articles together on different things, the four of us [George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli]. It was tremendously both stimulating and gratifying and exciting because it was new everyday. It was tremendously challenging and exciting every single day to be expanding the theoretical framework, to be responding to criticisms, to be refining the theory, to be refining the method, to be expanding the focus of the research and adapting to changing circumstances. It has provided me constant intellectual development, challenge, stimulation, and expansion for nearly thirty years. It is never the same thing and especially with the new developments in technology and new global developments in media policies, it’s always a new game.
BY: Any significant memories you’d like to share?
MM: Well there was 1980 in Acapulco for the ICA convention. It was really amazing to be there with him because he had not been there in 40 years. He had been there in 1940 when he first came to North America. He tried to get into the United States and they wouldn’t let him in so he ended up in Mexico. And the first place he was in was Acapulco. And at the time in Acapulco there were three hotels and he got a job as a tour guide. We spent the first couple of days before George got there watching the people parasailing. It looked absolutely terrifying and we thought the people that were doing it must be out of their minds. And when George arrived, he said, “Okay you’re all going up there.” And we said, “Ha-ha. What do you mean?” But he was a paratrooper in World War II. And he said, “This is nothing, you go up there right now.” And so he paid for us to go up and we have pictures of us coming down. He wrote, “What me worry?” on mine as I’m there with my arms out and my hands out and a big dumb look on my face, coming down the parachute, having a wonderful, terrified time.
But traveling with him was always nerve-wracking. I went to Russia with him, I went to Hungary with him, I went to Prague with him, I went to Vienna with him. He liked to get to the airport 5 minutes before the plane left. Otherwise he thought it was a waste of time. Why hang around the airport when there was always work to do. So he liked being the last one. He would get on the plane; they would shut the door and take off. Once or twice we almost missed it, but we always made the connections. Traveling with him was always a little nerve-wracking, because I would always get there 2 hours early, and he liked to be there 5 minutes before.
BY: Which reminds me of another story you told me. Didn’t he call you the night before your dissertation defense?
MM: Yes. I was defending my dissertation at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning. So the Sunday night before I was just trying to get relaxed and in the right head for my dissertation defense, which in those days was really something. And he called me Sunday night and said, “Hello Michael. Is your defense tomorrow morning?” I said yeah, yeah tomorrow morning. He said, “Okay, I better read your dissertation then.”
He was just so non-stop. His level of productivity was astonishing and the number of things he did. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of miles he traveled every year. And he somehow managed to publish dozens of papers every year. The level of productivity, the number of speeches he gave, especially the last 15 years or so when he was going around, he would just do his talk with no notes, no slides, no nothing. He would just talk for about an hour and a half, with lots of numbers and figures and tremendously impressive presentations, he just had it down. But he just never stopped. And you know, lots of people are driven, lots of people work really hard, but he had a passion for his work that you don’t see very often. His work was his life. There was no other life really, the work was everything. I mean he had a family, he was tremendously devoted to his family, they were very important to him. But there was no real other side to him, there was the work and the work was the man. It was remarkable passion. Devotion and intensity and productivity about his publishing, about his traveling, his speaking engagements, his engagement with the field wherever he was. It was just extraordinary.
Michael Morgan is the Board President of the Media Education Foundation and the Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is the author or co-author of Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research; Democracy Tango: Television, Adolescents, and Authoritarian Tensions in Argentina; "Television and the Erosion of Regional Diversity"; "Television and 'Family Values': Was Dan Quayle Right ; "Adolescents, VCRs, and the Family Environment"; co-editor, Mainstream(s) and Margins: Cultural Politics in the 90s, and Cultivation Analysis: New Directions in Media Effects Research. His current research includes studies on mass media and attitudes towards immigration, television and cultural participation, television and adolescents in Argentina, and meta-analysis of cultivation. He worked with George Gerbner on the Cultural Indicators Project from 1976 to 1983.
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