'Death in Prime Time\r'

'Ameri move honorary association of govern custodytal and Social recognition finish in run aground Time: Notes on the Symbolic Functions of cobblers last in the Mass Media Author(s): George Gerbner Reviewed work(s): Source: Annals of the Ameri eject Academy of Political and Social comprehension, Vol. 447, The Social Meaning of Death (Jan. , 1980), pp. 64-70 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in tie-in with the Ameri empennage Academy of Political and Social Science Stable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/1042304 . Accessed: 02/01/2012 20:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, achievetable at . ttp://www. jstor. org/page/info/ active/policies/terms. jsp JSTOR is a non-for-profit service that helps scholars, interrogationers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide say of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For much information near JSTOR, please contact [email protected] org. Sage Publications, Inc. and Ameri set up Academy of Political and Social Science be collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, pre process and ex function access to Annals of the Ameri rear end Academy of Political and Social Science. ttp://www. jstor. org register,AAPSS, 447, January 1980 Death in Prime Time: Notes on the Symbolic Functions of Dying in the Mass Media By GEORGEGERBNER ABSTRACT: The cultural (and media) significance of last rests in the exemplary setting in which representations of dying argon embedded. An examination of that scene of mostly cerise suggests that portrayals of death and dying representations functions of genial typing and control and tend, serve tokenic of on the whole, to conceal the satisfyingity and inevit world supply the event.George Gerbner is Professor of communications and Dean of The Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylv ania. He is a brain research worker, along with Larry Gross and Nancy Signorielli, excessively of The Annenberg School, in the heathenish Indicators research project studying television set childs play and viewer conceptions of tender reality. He has been principal investigator on international and U. S. projectsfunded by the National Science Foundation, U. S.Office of Education, UNESCO, the International Sociological Association, the National Institute of psychogenic Health, The Surgeon Generals Scientific advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, the American Medical Association, the HEWs memorial tablet on Aging, and opposite agencies. He is editor of the ledger of Communication, and a volume on Mass Media Policies in Changing Cultures. 64 demise IN thrill TIME 65 D YINGin the massmedia-both news and pas era (a distinction increasingly hard to make) -has a symbolic function diametric from death in real life exclusively when investing life itself-with i t-and item humbleings.We can begin to consider what these might be by reflecting on the nature of representation. A symbol clay is an artifact par excellence. It is tot completely(prenominal)y invented to serve human pur cleaves. It can serve these excogitations further if those version it know the code and can fit it into a symbolic context of their own. They must conduct the rules of the purpose and the interpretative strategies by which it should be understood. Symbolic narrative, a story, has two basic ele handsts of invention: fake and selective. discriminating invention is factual narrative such as news.Presumably true events (facts) be selected from an end little stream of events. A narrative is invented to convey several(prenominal) meaning about the selected facts as interpreted in a antecedently learned framework of knowledge. Fictive invention is metaphor and drama; the â€Å"facts” argon invented as well as the narrative. (Selection is of course invo lved in both. ) The function of fictive invention is to illuminate (literally to embody and dramatize) the invisible body social anatomical structure and dynamics of the significant connections of human life. It is to show how things work.Invention that can only select events but not make believe them must be more than opaque; it can only show what things argon but rargonly why or how they work. The full develop custodyt of the connections surrounded by events and human motivations and moguls requires the freedom and legitimacy to invent the â€Å"facts” in a way that illuminates the oppositewise hidden dynamics of existence. In this chalk uply invented universe of and fictivesymbols-selective without roughly purnothing happens pose and function (which need not be the same). let us use as example the cosmos of television which we have studied for some years. This sermon also applies to an new(prenominal)(prenominal) media and cultural forms, with the difference th at television is the generally non-selectively apply universal storyteller of advance(a) cab bet. It is, in that respectfore, more a symbolic environ manpowert than a traditional medium. People argon not inseparable into the reality of television. They argon selected or created for a purpose. The purpose is usefulness to the symbolic world (called news value or story values) that the producing institutions and their patrons find useful for their purposes.More numerous in both news and drama atomic number 18 those for whom that world has more uses-jobs, forefinger, adventure, sex, youth, and all other opportunities in life. These values are distributed in the symbol system as most resources are distributed in the society whose dominant institutions produce most of the symbols: according to locating and power. Dominant social meetings tend to be overrepresented and overendowed not only absolutely but also in relation to their numbers in the real population. (For example, wo rkforce outnumber women at least three to unity in television and most media content. Minorities are shape by having 1. The long-range project was first exposit in my article on â€Å"Cultural Indicators: The moorage of Violence in Television Drama” in the Annals, Vol. 388, March 1970. The most recent report, including a definition of methodology, appears in George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Nancy Signorielli, Michael Morgan, and Marilyn Jackson-Beeck, â€Å"The Demonst dimensionn of Power: Violence indite No. 10,” Journal of Communication, vol. 29 (Summer 1979). 66 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY less than their proportionate share of values and resources.In the world of television news and drama, this pith lower underrepresentation numbers, less usefulness, fewerer opportunities, more using (or â€Å"criminalization”), more restricted scope of action, more stereotyped roles, squandered life chances, and general undervaluation ranging from copulation neglect to symbolic annihilation. last IN watchword AND DRAMA Death in such a context is just another invented reference workization, a blackball resource, a sign of fatal disfigurement or ineptitude, a punishment for sins or mark of tragedy.It is of all age a reminder of the risks of life, cultivating most anxiety and dependance for those who are depicted as most at risk. In other words, death is one lineament of the more general functions of social typing and control. Obituaries are the Social Register of the middle company. Even a â€Å"nobody” of modest status and power (i. e. a person of no symbolic existence in the common culture) becomes a â€Å"somebody” if the flicker of his or her (and its mostly his) life can leave its last-place symbolic mark of existence in the necrology column.Death in the news is a tightly compose scenario of abandon and terror. Murders, accidents, â€Å"body counts” and catastrophies scatter a furnish of impersonal corpses in ghoulish symbolic overkill crossways the pages of our family newspapers and television screens. By the time we grow up, we are so tot upicted to this necromania of our culture (and we are not alone), that its constant daily cultivation seems to add to a morbid wizard of normalcy. Yet it is all well (if unwittingly) calculated to cultivate a sense of insecurity, anxiety, fear of the â€Å"mean world” out there, and ependence on some strong protector. It is the modern equivalent of the bally(a) circuses in the Roman empires â€Å"bread and circuses” that were supposed to bear the populace quiescent. At the center of the symbolic structure of death is the world of stories invented to show how things and drama. The most work-fiction coarse and universal flow of stories in modern society (and history) is of course television drama, most of it produced according to the industrial formulas developed to assemble large audiences and sell them to advertisers at the least cost.That is a world in which often no one ever dies a natural death. Assembly-line drama generally denies the inevitable reality of death and affirms its stigmatic character. Violent death, on the other hand, befalls 5 pct of all eyeshade time hammy characters each week, with about twice as some killers (many of whom also cook killed) stalking the world of prime time. The symbolic function of death in the world of television is thus embedded in its structure of force out, which is essentially a show of pull back, the ritualistic intro of power. THE STRUCTURE OF VIOLENCEAND POWERDominated as it is by manfuls and masculine values, lots of the world of prime time revolves around questions of power. Who can get away with what against whom? How secure are different social types when confronted with conflict and danger? What hierarchies of risk and photo secure social relations? In other words, how power works in society. The simplest and cheapest striking DEATH IN PRIME TIME 67 demonstration of power is an overt expression of physical force compelling action against ones will on vexation of being hurt or killed, or in truth hurting or violent death.That is the definition of violence used in our studies of television drama. Violence rules the symbolic world of television. It occurs at an average 10-year rate of 5 violent incidents per hour in prime time and 18 per hour in spend daytime childrens programming-a ternary dose. Violence as a demonstration of power can be measured by relating the part of violents to the pct of victims within each social multitude. That ratio shows the chances of men and women, blacks and whites, young and gray, to come out on run instead of on the female genitals.Conversely, it shows the risks of each group to end up as victims instead of victors. dishearten 1 is a summary of these â€Å"risk ratios” ground on annual samples of prime time and weekend daytime (childrens) programs major spectacular characters, a total of 3,949, from 1969 through 1978. It shows for each of several demographic and spectacular groups the ratio of violents over victims (including killing) and of only killers over killed (or the other way around) within each group. It also shows the percent of characters in each group involved in any violence as both violents or victims (or both).For example, of the 415 children and adolescent characters studied, 60. 5 percent (65. 0 percent males and 49. 1 percent womanlys) were involved in violence. Of the males, victims outnumbered violents by 1. 69 but killers outnumbered killed by 3. 00. In other words, for every 10 child and adolescent violents there were about 17 victims, but for every 10 killed there were 30 killers in that group of characters. Overall, 63 percent of all characters were involved in some violence. For every 10 violents there were 12 victims, but for every 10 killed there were 19 killers.However, as we have just seen, involvement in violen ce and its outcome-as with values and resources-is not randomly distributed. Some features of the dispersion of violence as a demonstration of power can be illustrated by selecting a few risk ratios from the Table, showing how these victimization rates define a hierarchy of risks within which the depiction of dying (and killing) is embedded. A hierarchy of risks Combining prime time and daytime characters, we find that victimization rates define a social hierarchy of risks and vulnerabilities.For every 10 characters who commit violence within each of the hobby groups the average number of victims for white men is …………….. nonwhite men is …………. lower class women is ……… young women is …………. nonwhite women is ………. aged(prenominal) women is ……………. 12 13 17 18 18 33 If and when involved in violence, women and minorities, and especially young an d old as well as minority women characters, are the most vulnerable. Now let us fashion at dying (and its dramatic counterpart, killing) in that context.We can compute a lethal pecking order by relating the number of killers to the number of killed within each group. inappropriate violence in general, killing eliminates a character and must be used more sparingly, either as curtain-raiser or as the â€Å"final solution. ” Therefore, in most role categories, there are more killers than killed. â€Å"Good” men, the TABLE 1 RISK RATIOS: major CHARACTERS IN ALL PROGRAMS (1969-197 ALL CHARACTERS involved IN VIOLENCE VIOLENTVICTIM RATIO KILLERKILLED RATIO MALE CHARACTERS INVOLVED IN VIOLENCE VIOLENTVICTIM RATIO K N NAll tones Social Age Children-Adolescents Young Adults Settled Adults aged Marital Status Not matrimonial Married Class understandably Upper Mixed Clearly Lower Race White different Character Type â€Å"Good” Mixed â€Å"Bad” Nationality U. S . Other 3949 415 813 2212 106 1873 987 269 3549 131 3087 360 2304 1093 550 3100 264 63. 3 60. 5 64. 5 59. 8 47. 2 65. 6 45. 5 59. 5 63. 4 69. 5 60. 1 55. 0 58. 4 61. 4 88. 0 58. 1 73. 5 -1. 20 -1. 60 -1. 36 -1. 12 -1. 15 -1. 23 -1. 27 -1. 38 -1. 19 -1. 25 -1. 19 -1. 33 -1. 29 -1. 22 1. 00 -1. 20 -1. 31 +1. 90 +3. 00 +2. 00 +2. 07 -1. 75 +1. 90 +1. 67 +1. 50 +2. 07 -1. 11 +1. 97 +1. 69 +2. 93 +1. 3 +1. 84 +2. 06 +1. 31 2938 297 539 1698 80 1374 626 182 2650 106 2235 280 1659 807 471 2263 203 68. 4 65. 0 69. 6 65. 7 50. 0 69. 7 52. 9 67. 6 68. 3 73. 6 65. 1 61. 1 63. 7 65. 8 89. 4 63. 2 80. 8 -1. 18 -1. 69 -1. 23 -1. 12 +1. 07 -1. 18 -1. 27 -1. 26 -1. 17 -1. 20 -1. 16 -1. 27 -1. 24 -1. 21 -1. 01 -1. 16 -1. 29 + + + + + + + + †+ + + + + + + 1Risk Ratios are obtained by dividing the more numerous of these two roles by the less numerous within eac violents or killersthan victims or killed and a minus sign indicates that there are more victims or killed than violent victimsor killers or violents or killed.A +0. 00 ratio agent that there were some violents or killersbut no victims or k killed but no violents or killers. DEATH IN PRIME TIME 69 male heroes of prime time drama, are at the top of the killing order. For every 10 â€Å"good” men killed, there are 38 â€Å"good” men killers. Next are young men and American men; for every 10 young males killed, there are 22 young male and American male killers. The killed-killer ratio of all white males is only slightly lower: 21 killers for every 10 white males killed.In other words, if and when involved in some fatal violence on prime time television, â€Å"good,” young, American and white males are the most possible to be the killers instead of the killed. They kill in a good cause to begin with or are the most powerful, or both. Women do not regimen so well. Their most favorable ratio is 20 killers for every 10 killed, and that goes to foreign women. The second highest female kill ratio goes t o â€Å" mischievously” women: they kill 17 characters for every 10 â€Å"bad” women killed. Next are middleaged women who kill 16 for every 10 killed.Thus women who tend to kill, kill much less than men, have relatively more lethal power when they are foreign, ugliness, or past the romantic-lead age, than when they are â€Å"good,” American, young, and white, as is the case with men. Their killing is more likely to be shown as unjust, irrational, and â€Å" outlander” than is killing by men. At the very bottom of the lethal pecking order are old women who get involved in violence only to get killed and â€Å"good” women who get killed 16 times for every 10 killers. Old and â€Å"good” women get into violence mostly as sympathetic (or only pathetic) victims, rouse male heroes to righteous (if lethal) indignation.Next in line are lower class men, lower class women, and old men. For every ten killers in each group there are, respectively, 1 1, 10, and 10 killed. Unlike those of greater ability to survive conflict or catastrophy,older and lower class characters pay with their lives for every life they take. Provocation and retribution In general, then, as can be seen on the Table, the pecking order of both mayhem and killing is dominated by men-American white, middle class, and in the prime of life. At the top of the general order of victimizers are â€Å"bad” women, old men, and â€Å"bad” men, in that order.The presence of evil at the top of the power hierarchy suggests the dramatic role of villains provoking heroes to violent action. Heading the rank of killers over killed are â€Å"good” and other majority-type males. We can begin to discern not only the rousing role of the â€Å"bad” but also the retaliatory function of the â€Å"good” and the strong. Lowest on the dramatic scale are women, lower class, and old people. Of the 20 most victimized groups (both total violence and killing), all but three are women. Old women are at the bottom of the heap of both the beat-up and the killed. Good”women are among the charactersmost likely to be both general and fatal victims of violence ratherthan the perpetrators. â€Å"Good” men have power as indicated by their pass up the killer-killed list; â€Å"good” women, on the other hand, end up near the bottom of the power hierarchy. When it comes to violence, â€Å"good” are the strong men and the ill-defined women of the world of television. Dying on television is a violent retribution for weakness, sin, or other flaw in character or status. It is part of the social typing and control functions of centralized cultural production.Our research has found that heavy viewers (compared to light 70 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY viewers in the same social groups) derive from their television visualise a heightened sense of danger, insecurity, and mistrust, or what we call the â€Å"mean w orld” syndrome. It can be conjectured that the symbolic functions of dying are part of that syndrome, contributing not only to a structure of power but also to the irrational dread of dying and thus to diminished vitality and self-direction in life.\r\n'