Most of what we know, or think we know, we have never personally experienced. We live in a world erected by stories. Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and offer models of conformity or targets for rebellion. They weave the seamless web of our cultural environment. Our stories used to be hand crafted, home made, community inspired. Now they are mostly mass produced and policy driven, the result of a complex manufacturing and marketing process we know as the mass media. This situation calls for a new diagnosis and a new prescription.
The stories that animate our cultural environment have three distinct but related functions: to reveal how things work, to describe what things are, and to tell us what to do about them.
Stories of the first kind, revealing how things work, illuminate the all-important but invisible relationships and hidden dynamics of life. Fairy tales, novels, plays, comics, cartoons, and other forms of creative imagination and imagery are the basic building blocks of human understanding. They show complex causality by presenting imaginary action in total situations, coming to some conclusion that has a moral purpose and a social function. You don't have to believe the "facts" of Little Red Riding Hood to grasp the notion that big bad "wolves" victimize old women and trick little girls--a lesson in gender roles, fear, and power. Stories of the first kind build, from infancy on, the fantasy we call reality. I do not suggest that the revelations are false, which they may or may not be, but that they are synthetic, selective, often mythical, and always socially constructed.
Stories of the second kind depict what things are. These are descriptions, depictions, expositions, and reports abstracted from total situations. They fill in with "facts" the fantasies conjured up by stories of the first kind. They are the presumably factual accounts, the chronicles of the past and the news of today. Stories of what things are may confirm or deny some conception of how things work. Their high "facticity" (correspondence to actual events presumed to exist independently of the story) gives them special status in political theory and often in law. They give emphasis and credibility to selected parts of society's fantasies of reality. They convey information about finance, weddings, crime, lotteries, terrorists, and so on. They alert us to certain interests, threats, opportunities, and challenges.
Stories of the third kind tell us what to do. These are stories of value and choice. They present things, behaviors, or styles of life as desirable or undesirable, propose ways to obtain or avoid them, and the price to be paid for attainment or failure. They are the instructions, laws, regulations, cautionary tales, commands, slogans, sermons, and exhortations. Today most of them are called commercials.
Stories of the third kind clinch the lessons of the first two and turn them into action. They typically present an objective to be sought or to be avoided, and offer a product, service, candidate, institution, or action purported to help attain or avoid it. The lessons of fictitious Little Red Riding Hoods and their more realistic sequels prominent in everyday news and entertainment not only teach lessons of vulnerability, mistrust, and dependence but also help sell burglar alarms, more jails, and executions, all in the name of enhanced security.
Ideally, the three kinds of stories check and balance each other. But in a commercially driven culture, stories of the third kind pay for most of the first two. This creates a coherent cultural environment whose overall function is to provide a hospitable and effective context for stories that sell. With the coming of the electronic age, that cultural environment is increasingly monopolized, homogenized, and globalized. We must then look at the historic course of our journey to see what this new age means for us and for our children.
For the longest time in human history, stories were told only face-to-face. A community was defined by the rituals, mythologies, and imageries held in common. All useful knowledge was encapsulated in aphorisms and legends, proverbs and tales, incantations and ceremonies. Writing was rare and holy. Laboriously inscribed manuscripts conferred sacred power to their interpreters, the priests and ministers. State and church ruled in a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence and tension. The state, composed of feudal nobles, was the economic, military, and political order; the church its cultural arm.
The industrial revolution changed all that. One of the first machines stamping out standardized artifacts was the printing press. Its product, the book, was a prerequisite for all the other upheavals to come. Printing began the industrialization of storytelling, and was arguably the most profound transformation in the humanization process.
The book could be given to all who could read, requiring education and creating a new literate class of people. Readers could now interpret the book (at first the Bible) for themselves, breaking the monopoly of priestly interpreters and ushering in the Reformation.
When the printing press was hooked up to the steam engine the industrialization of storytelling shifted into high gear. Rapid publication and mass transport created a new form of consciousness: modern mass publics. Publics are those loose aggregations of people who share some common consciousness of how things work, what things are, and what ought to be done--but never meet face-to-face. That was never before possible.
Stories could now be sent--often smuggled--across hitherto impenetrable or closely guarded boundaries of time, space, and status. The book lifts people from their traditional moorings as the industrial revolution uproots them from their local communities and cultures. They can now get off the land and go to work in far-away ports, factories, and continents, and have with them a packet of common consciousness--the book or journal--wherever they go.
The second great transformation, the electronic revolution, ushered in the telecommunications era. Its main medium, television, superimposes upon and reorganizes print-based culture. Unlike the industrial revolution, the new upheaval does not uproot people from their homes but transports them in their homes. It re-tribalizes modern society. It challenges and changes the role of both church and education in the new culture.
For the first time in human history, children are born into homes where mass-produced stories reach them on the average more than seven hours a day. Most waking hours, and often dreams, are filled with these stories. The stories do not come from families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and often not even from their native countries. They come from a small group of distant conglomerates with something to sell.
The cultural environment in which we live has become the byproduct of marketing. The historic nexus of state and church is replaced by the new symbiotic relationship of state and television. The "state" itself is the twin institution of elected public government and selected private corporate government, ruling in the legal, military, and economic domains. Media, its cultural arm, are dominated by the private establishment, despite their use of the public airways. Giant industries discharge their messages into the mainstream of common consciousness. Channels proliferate and new technologies pervade home and office while mergers and bottom-line pressures shrink creative alternatives and reduce diversity of content.
These changes may appear to be broadening local, parochial horizons, but they also mean a homogenization of outlooks and a limitation of alternatives. For media professionals, the changes mean fewer opportunities and greater compulsions to present life in saleable packages. Creative artists, scientists, humanists can still explore and enlighten and occasionally even challenge, but increasingly their stories must fit marketing strategies and priorities.
As audiences we pay dearly for our "free" news and entertainment through a surcharge added to the price of every advertised product. Allowing advertising costs to be a tax-deductible business expense is a further give-away of public money for private purposes.
Broadcasting is the most concentrated, homogenized, and globalized medium. The top 100 U.S. advertisers pay for two-thirds of all network television. Four networks, allied to giant transnational corporations--our private Ministry of Culture--control the bulk of production and distribution, and shape the cultural mainstream. Other interests--religious, political or educational--lose ground with every merger.
Formula-driven assembly-line produced programs increasingly dominate the airways. The formulas themselves reflect the structure of power that produces them and function to preserve and enhance that structure of power. A central formula in this globalized system is that of violence. The pervasiveness of violent programming is a good example of how the media system works. It is also an indication of the magnitude and nature of the challenge before us.
Humankind may have had more bloodthirsty eras, but none as filled with images of crime and violence as the present. Overall, U.S. television networks doubled the time given to crime coverage between 1992 and 1993. News of crime surges to new highs, while violent crime rates remain essentially flat or decline. The overrepresentation of violence is especially clear in local television news. A 1994 University of Miami study of local television news, for example, found that time devoted to crime ranged from 23% to 50% of news time (averaging 32%) while violent crime in the city remained constant, involving less than 0.1% of the population.
Not only is it the case that local news shows are dominated by vivid images of violence, but in a high percentage of cases African-Americans and Latinos are shown as the perpetrators of that violence, contributing to a sense of fear and distrust, according to a 1994 study by Robert Entman for the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs. Another 1994 study by Johnstone, Hawkins and Michener looked at homicide news reporting and found that only one of three actual homicides was reported, and that the most likely to be selected were those in which the victims were white rather than black or Latino, contrary to the actual crime statistics.
Our own Cultural Indicators study of local news on Philadelphia television found that crime and/or violence items usually lead the newscast. Furthermore, 80% of crime and violence reported on Philadelphia local news was not even local to the city. It is as if a quota were imposed on the editorial staff which they have to fill from wherever they can.
Violence is also prevalent in entertainment. The percentage of primetime television dramatic programs with overt physical violence was 58% in 1974, 73% in 1984, and 75% in 1994. The saturation of violent scenes was five per hour in 1974, five per hour in 1984, and five per hour in 1994--unchanged. In Saturday morning children's programs, scenes of violence occur between 20 and 25 times per hour. They are sugar coated with humor, to be sure, to make the pill of power easier to swallow.
Action movies cash in on this trend, increasing the violence level as each sequel comes out. Vincent Canby tells us the following in his New York Times article entitled "Body Count," published in July 1990. Robocop's first rampage for law and order killed 32 people; Robocop 2 slaughtered 81. The movie Death Wish claimed nine victims; in the sequel, the bleeding-heart-liberal-turned-vigilante disposed of 52 victims. Similarly Rambo: First Blood rambled through Southeast Asia leaving 62 corpses, while Rambo III visited Afghanistan killing 106.
Violence is a demonstration of power. Its principal lesson is to show quickly and dramatically who can get away with what against whom. It defines majority might and minority risk. It shows one's place in the societal pecking order.
This kind of story has consequences. Our surveys show that heavy viewers of television express a greater sense of apprehension and vulnerability than do light viewers in the same groups. Heavy viewers are also more likely than comparable groups of light viewers to overestimate their chances of involvement in violence; to believe that their neighborhoods are unsafe; to state that fear of crime is a very serious personal problem; and to assume that crime is rising, regardless of the facts of the case. Heavy viewers of television are also more likely to buy new locks, watchdogs, and guns "for protection" (thus becoming the major cause of handgun violence).
Moreover, viewers who see members of their own group underrepresented but overvictimized develop an even greater sense of apprehension and mistrust. Insecure, angry, mistrustful people may be prone to violence but are even more likely to be dependent on authority and susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, hard-line postures and appeals.
Violence is, of course, a legitimate, even necessary, news and dramatic feature to demonstrate the tragic costs of deadly compulsions. However, such a tragic sense of violence has been swamped by "happy violence" produced on the television dramatic assembly-line. "Happy violence" is cool, swift, and painless, and always leads to a happy ending. It occurs five times per hour, designed to deliver the audience to the next commercial in a receptive mood.
What drives this media violence? The usual rationalization is that media violence "gives the public what it wants." This is disingenuous. The public rarely gets a fair choice of programming in which all elements but violence are equal. But besides this, there is no evidence that, cost and other factors being equal, violence per se gives audiences "what they want." As the trade paper Broadcasting & Cable said in an editorial on September 20, 1993, "the most popular programming is hardly violent as anyone with a passing knowledge of Nielsen ratings will tell you."
Our own study confirms this. We compared the ratings of over 100 violent and 100 non-violent shows aired at the same time on network television. The average Nielsen rating of the violent sample was 11.1; the rating for the non-violent sample was 13.8. The share of viewing households in the violent and non-violent samples, respectively, was 18.9 and 22.5. The non-violent sample was more highly rated than the violent sample for each of the five seasons studied. The amount and consistency of violence further increased the unpopularity gap.
Media violence is, in fact, a consequence of media economics. Concentration of ownership in media denies access to new entries and to alternative perspectives. Having fewer buyers for their products forces the remaining "content providers" deeper into deficit financing. As a consequence, most television and movie producers cannot break even on the U.S. domestic market. They are forced into video and foreign sales to make a profit. Therefore, they need a dramatic ingredient that requires no translation and fits any culture. That ingredient is violence.
Syndicators demand "action" (the code word for violence) because it travels well. As the producer of Die Hard 2 said in the May 17, 1992 New Yorker, "Everyone understands an action movie. If I tell a joke, you may not get it, but if a bullet goes through the window, we all know how to hit the floor, no matter the language."
Violence dominates U.S. exports. We compared 250 U.S. programs exported to ten countries with 111 programs shown in the U.S. during the same year. Violence was the main theme of 40% of home-shown and 49% of exported programs. Crime/action series comprised 17% of home-shown and 46% of exported programs. NAFTA and GATT will dump even more mayhem on the world in the name of "free trade."
People suffer the media violence inflicted on them with diminishing tolerance. In a Times-Mirror national poll in 1993, for example, 80% said entertainment violence was "harmful" to society, compared with 64% in 1983.
Local broadcasters, legally responsible for what goes on the air, also oppose the overkill and complain about loss of control. Electronic Media reported on August 2, 1993 that in its own survey of 100 general managers, three out of four said there is too much needless violence on television and 57% would like to have "more input on program content decisions." A U.S. News & World Report survey published on April 30, 1994 found that 59% of media workers saw entertainment violence as a serious problem.
There is a liberating alternative. There is something we can do. It exists in various forms in all democratic countries. It involves the development of an independent citizen voice in cultural policy making. The Cultural Environment Movement (CEM) was launched for this purpose. Its Founding Convention was held in St. Louis, Missouri in March 1996. It was the most diverse international assembly of leaders and activists in the field of culture and communication that has ever met. The 261 participants debated and approved a "People's Communication Charter," the "Viewer's Declaration of Independence," and developed recommendations for action from 15 task forces.
The concepts that motivated us were developed after 30 years of media research. It became clear that research is not enough; we must reclaim the fights gained through centuries of struggle. Working separately on individual issues, rallying to meet each individual crisis, was not sufficient. Treating symptoms instead of the wholesale manufacturing of the conditions that led to those symptoms was self-defeating. The new approach of the CEM seeks to treat the cause in a number of ways.
CEM is working to build a new coalition involving: media councils worldwide; teachers, students, and parents; groups concerned with children, youth, and aging; women's groups; religious and minority organizations; educational, health, environmental, legal, and other professional associations; consumer groups and agencies; associations of creative workers in the media and in the arts and sciences; independent computer network organizers and other organizations and individuals committed to broadening the freedom and diversity of communication.
CEM, and the coalition as a whole, opposes domination and works to abolish existing concentration of ownership and censorship (both of and by media), public or private. This involves extending fights, facilities, and influence to interests and perspectives other than the most powerful and profitable. It means involving in cultural decision making the less affluent and more vulnerable groups, including the marginalized, neglected, abused, exploited, physically or mentally disabled, young and old, women, minorities, poor people, recent immigrants--all those most in need of a decent role and a voice in a freer cultural environment.
There is also an international dimension, seeking out and cooperating with the cultural liberation forces of all countries that are working for the integrity and independence of their own decision making and against cultural domination and invasion. It is important to learn from countries that have already opened their media to the democratic process, and to help local movements, including in the most dependent and vulnerable countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa (and also in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics), to invest in their own cultural development and to oppose aggressive foreign ownership and coercive trade policies that make such development more difficult.
Another weave of the work is supporting journalists, artists, writers, actors, irectors, and other creative workers struggling for freedom from having to present life as a commodity designed for a market of consumers. By working with guilds, caucuses, labor, and other groups for diversity in employment and in media content we can support media and cultural organizations that address significant but neglected needs, sensibilities, and interests.
Promoting media literacy, media awareness, critical viewing and reading, and other media education efforts can constitute a fresh approach to the liberal arts and an essential educational objective on every level. CEM works to collect, publicize, and disseminate information, research, and evaluation about relevant programs, services, curricula, and teaching materials and helps to organize educational and parents' groups demanding pre-service and in-service teacher training in media analysis. This is already required in the schools of Australia, Canada, and Great Britain.
Finally, cultural policy issues must be placed on the social-political agenda. The CEM supports and, if necessary, organizes local and national media councils, study groups, citizen groups, minority and professional groups, and other forums of public discussion, policy development, representation, and action. It isn't a matter of waiting for a blueprint but of creating and experimenting with ways of community and citizen participation in local, national, and international media policy making. In this way we share experiences, lessons, and recommendations and, thus, gradually move towards a realistic democratic agenda.
The condition of the physical environment may determine how long our species survives. But it is the cultural environment that affects the quality of any survival. We need to begin the long process of diversifying, pacifying, democratizing, and humanizing the mainstream storytelling process that shapes the cultural environment in which we live and into which our children are born.
(*) Earlier versions of parts of this essay were published in Culturelink, August 1996, and Nieman Reports, Fall 1996.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Entman, Robert M. 1994. Violence on Television News: News and "Reality" Programming in Chicago. Chicago: Chicago Council on Urban Affairs.
Gerbner, George. 1995. "Television Violence: The Power and the Peril." in Gail Dines & Jean M. Humez (eds.), Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Text-Reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Johnstone, John W.C, Darnell F. Hawkins & Arthur Michener. 1994. "Homicide Reporting in Chicago Dailies." Journalism Quarterly 71(4) (Winter): 860.
Cultural Indicators Project. This is a database and a research project that monitors selected media content and relates recurrent features of media content to public conceptions of social reality. For more information, write to the author at University City Science Center, 3624 Market Street, One East, Philadelphia, PA 19104; E-mail: fgg@asc.upenn.edu.
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By George Gerbner
George Gerbner is Bell Atlantic Professor of Communications at Temple University in Philadelphia, and former Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is founder and President of the Cultural Environment Movement and directs the ongoing Cultural Indicators Project. Correspondence: University City Science Center, 3624 Market Street, One East, Philadelphia, PA 19104; E-mail: fgg@asc.upenn.edu