George Gerbner—A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory

One of the world’s most influential and prolific media scholars, George Gerbner played a major role in the development of communication theory and research. His critical approach to mass communication changed the way we think about media industries, the messages and images they produce, and their social and cultural impacts.
Gerbner is most widely known for his decades of work on television violence, but his research and writing focused on many other vital aspects of the symbolic cultural environment. This book provides a broad-based introduction to Gerbner’s theories of mass communication, his long-term research on media content and effects, and the critical and policy contributions of his work.
Although hundreds of studies have been conducted based on Gerbner’s ideas, this is the first volume to provide a concise and comprehensive overview of his many contributions to the field.

Michael Morgan (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 1980) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has authored or co-authored over 100 national and international scholarly articles and book chapters (many of them with George Gerbner) on the effects of television on images of violence, sex-roles, aging, health, science, academic achievement, political orientations, the family, and other issues. He is the editor of Against the Mainstream: The Selected Works of George Gerbner (Peter Lang, 2002).