mass-communication-theory

THE CONTROVERSY
Chapter 11 Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World 343
differently, television’s impact on our collective sense of reality is real and important,
even though that effect might be beyond clear-cut scientific measurement, might defy
easy observation, and might be inextricably bound to other factors in the culture. As
we saw in Chapter 10, contemporary effects researchers have begun to address these
types of effects. They refer to them as cumulative effects.
Throughout this text, we have introduced various controversies, schools of theory,
and antagonistic perspectives. The debate (as well as its intensity) surrounding cultivation
analysis, then, should come as no surprise, especially because, if nothing
else, the Gerbner work attempted to use traditional postpositivist empirical research
methods to address essential humanistic questions. In other words, Gerbner
and his colleagues used tools of inquiry most often identified with the limitedeffects
perspective to examine questions most often identified with cultural studies.
Horace Newcomb, for example, wrote: “More than any other research effort
in the area of television studies the work of Gerbner and Gross and their associates
sits squarely at the juncture of the social sciences and the humanities” (Gerbner et
al., 1978, p. 265). This, more than anything, is what fueled so much debate. By asserting
effects beyond the apparent control of most audience members, the Cultural
Indicators Project offended those humanists engaged in cultural studies who felt
that their turf had been improperly appropriated and misinterpreted. In asserting
significant but possibly unmeasurable, unobservable effects, the project challenged
the work, if not the belief system, of the many postpositivists who adhered to the
limited-effects perspective.
In a rather fundamental way, the Gerbner group dismissed virtually all existing
attitude-change research, all television violence research conducted in laboratories,
all television research accepting change as the only measure of the medium’s effect,
and all research employing an individual program or one particular type of program;
in essence, almost all extant television effects research was deemed of small
value. Yet Newcomb, one of the first and most influential cultivation critics, wrote
of the Gerbner group:
Their foresight to collect data on a systematic, long-term basis, to move out of the laboratory
and away from the closed experimental model, will enable other researchers to
avoid costly mistakes. Their material holds a wealth of information. The violence topic
provides only one of many symbol clusters to be examined. As they move into new
areas, and hopefully retrieve more, and more complex information from audiences, we
should see whole new sets of questions and answers emerging to aid us in explaining
television’s role in our culture. (1978, p. 281)
What exactly were the conclusions drawn initially by the Violence Index, then
ultimately by the Cultural Indicators Project, that generated so much disagreement,
that so inflamed what we generally think of as scientific objectivity?
THE PRODUCTS OF CULTIVATION ANALYSIS
To scientifically demonstrate their view of television as a culturally influential medium,
cultivation researchers depended on a four-step process. The first they called
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