Death in Prime Time

Ameri washbowl honorary society of Political and accessible Science Death in Prime Time Notes on the Symbolic Functions of last in the Mass Media Author(s) George Gerbner Reviewed work(s) Source Annals of the Ameri evoke Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 447, The Social nitty-gritty of Death (Jan. , 1980), pp. 64-70 Published by Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the Ameri undersurface Academy of Political and Social Science Stable URL http//www. jstor. org/stable/1042304 . Accessed 02/01/2012 2034 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the scathe & Conditions of Use, available at . ttp//www. jstor. org/page/info/ intimately/policies/terms. jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, look intoers, and students discover, use, and build upon a widely range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to change magnitude productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more than (prenominal) information about JSTOR, please contact emailprotected org. Sage Publications, Inc. and American Academy of Political and Social Science argon collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, pre work and extend access to Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. ttp//www. jstor. org ANNALS,AAPSS, 447, January 1980 Death in Prime Time Notes on the Symbolic Functions of end in the Mass Media By GEORGEGERBNER ABSTRACT The cultural (and media) significance of dying rests in the symbolic setting in which representations of dying atomic number 18 embedded. An examination of that context of mostly lashing suggests that portrayals of devastation and dying representations functions of companionable typing and control and tend, serve symbolic of on the whole, to conceal the rattlingity and inevitability the event.George Gerbner is Professor of communications and Dean of The Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania. He is a principal tec, a long with Larry Gross and Nancy Signorielli, also of The Annenberg School, in the cultural Indicators research project studying television drama and viewer conceptions of social 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 affable Health, The Surgeon Generals Scientific advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, the American Medical Association, the HEWs judgeship on Aging, and new(prenominal) agencies. He is editor of the Journal of Communication, and a volume on Mass Media Policies in Changing Cultures. 64 DEATH IN PRIME TIME 65 D YINGin the massmedia-both news and diversion (a distinction increasingly hard to make) -has a symbolic function antithetical from death in real life exclusively investing life itself-with it-and particular dream upings.We can begin to consider what these mig ht be by reflecting on the nature of representation. A symbol organisation is an artifact par excellence. It is tot exclusivelyy invented to serve human purposes. It can serve these purposes hardly if those interpreting it know the code and can fit it into a symbolic context of their own. They must solelyot the rules of the invention and the interpretative strategies by which it should be understood. Symbolic narrative, a story, has two basic ele handsts of invention fictive and selective. Selective invention is factual narrative such as news.Presumably true events (facts) atomic number 18 selected from an end slight stream of events. A narrative is invented to convey some meaning about the selected facts as interpreted in a previously learned framework of knowledge. Fictive invention is allegory and drama the facts atomic number 18 invented as well as the narrative. (Selection is of course involved in both. ) The function of fictive invention is to illuminate (literally to embody and dramatize) the invisible 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 create them must be more opaque it can only show what things are but rarely why or how they work. The full develop workforcet of the connections in the midst of events and human motivations and origins requires the freedom and legitimacy to invent the facts in a way that illuminates the other(a)wise hidden dynamics of existence. In this totally invented world of and fictivesymbols-selective without some purnothing happens pose and function (which need not be the same). permit us use as example the world of television which we have studied for some years. This give-and-take also applies to other media and cultural forms, with the difference that television is the generally non-selectively utilise universal storyteller of new-made society. It is, in that respectfore, more a symbolic env iron ment than a traditional medium. People are not innate(p) into the world of television. They are selected or created for a purpose. The purpose is usefulness to the symbolic world (called news determine or story values) that the producing institutions and their patrons find useful for their purposes.More numerous in both news and drama are those for whom that world has more uses-jobs, power, 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 status and power. Dominant social conclaves tend to be overrepresented and overendowed not only absolutely but also in relation to their numbers in the real population. (For example, men outnumber women at least three to virtuoso in television and most media content. Minorities are stick aroundd by having 1. The long-range project was first describe in my article on Cultural Indicators The Case of Violence in Television Drama in the Annals, Vol. 388, March 1970. The most recent report, including a description of methodology, appears in George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Nancy Signorielli, Michael Morgan, and Marilyn Jackson-Beeck, The Demonstration of Power Violence write 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 means lower underrepresentation numbers, less usefulness, fewer opportunities, more victimization (or criminalization), more restricted scope of action, more stereotyped roles, minor life chances, and general undervaluation ranging from sexual congress neglect to symbolic annihilation. DEATH IN NEWS AND DRAMA Death in such a context is just another invented characterization, a negative resource, a sign of fatal stigma or ineptitude, a punishment for sins or mark of tragedy.I t is always a reminder of the risks of life, cultivating most anxiety and colony for those who are depicted as most at risk. In other words, death is one swash of the more general functions of social typing and control. Obituaries are the Social Register of the middle disunite. Even a nobody of modest status and power (i. e. a person of no symbolic existence in the common culture) becomes a somebody if the flicker of his or her (and its mostly his) life can leave its lowest symbolic mark of existence in the obituary column.Death in the news is a tightly script scenario of abandon and terror. Murders, accidents, body counts and catastrophies scatter a surfeit of impersonal corpses in ghoulish symbolic overkill crosswise the pages of our family newspapers and television screens. By the beat we grow up, we are so addicted to this necromania of our culture (and we are not alone), that its constant daily cultivation seems to add to a morbid sense of normalcy. Yet it is all well (i f unwittingly) calculated to cultivate a sense of insecurity, anxiety, fear of the mean world out there, and ependence on some strong protector. It is the modern equivalent of the bloody circuses in the Roman empires bread and circuses that were supposed to pull through 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 colossal 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 percent of all gush while prominent characters every week, with about twice as many killers (many of whom also get killed) stalking the world of prime time. The symbolic function of death in the world of television is thus embedded in its structure of abandon, which is essentially a show of force, the ritualistic consequence of power. THE STRUCTURE OF VIOLENCEAND POWERDominated as it is by manlys and masculine values, such(prenominal) 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 vulnerability define social relations? In other words, how power works in society. The simplest and cheapest prominent DEATH IN PRIME TIME 67 demonstration of power is an overt expression of physical force compelling action against ones will on offend of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or cleaning.That is the definition of violence used in our studies of television drama. Violence rules the symbolic world of television. It oc curs 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 triple dose. Violence as a demonstration of power can be measured by relating the percent of violents to the percent of victims within each social group. That ratio shows the chances of men and women, blacks and whites, young and old, to come out on top instead of on the seat.Conversely, it shows the risks of each group to end up as victims instead of victors. delay 1 is a summary of these risk ratios based on annual samples of prime time and weekend daytime (childrens) programs major melodramatic characters, a total of 3,949, from 1969 through 1978. It shows for each of several demographic and dramatic 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 each 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 feminines) 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 violence and its outcome-as with values and resources-is not randomly distributed. Some features of the distribution 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 following groups the average number of victims for white men is .. nonwhite men is . lower class women is young women is . nonwhite women is . old women is . 12 13 17 18 18 33 If and when involved in violence, women and minorities, and especially young and old as well as minority women characters, are the most vulnerable. Now let us look 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 final solution. Therefore, in most role categories, there are more killers than killed. Good men, the TABLE 1 RISK RATIOS MAJOR CHARAC TERS IN ALL PROGRAMS (1969-197 ALL CHARACTERS INVOLVED IN VIOLENCE VIOLENTVICTIM RATIO KILLERKILLED RATIO MALE CHARACTERS INVOLVED IN VIOLENCE VIOLENTVICTIM RATIO K N NAll regions Social Age Children-Adolescents Young Adults Settled Adults Elderly Marital Status Not get married Married Class Clearly Upper Mixed Clearly Lower Race White Other Character Type Good Mixed 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 killersor violents or killed.A +0. 00 ratio means 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 good men killed, there are 38 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, goo d, young, American and white males are the most likely 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 transfer 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 to bad women they kill 17 characters for every 10 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 comparatively more lethal power when they are foreign, immoral, or past the romantic-lead age, than when they are good, American, young, and white, as is the case with men. Their killing is more likely to be shown as unjust, irrational, and alien 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 good women who get killed 16 times for every 10 killers. Old and good women get into vio lence mostly as sympathetic (or only pathetic) victims, rousing 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, 11, 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 bad women, old men, and 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 good and other majority-type males. We can begin to discern not only the incendiary role of the bad but also the retri butive function of the 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 knock about and the killed. Goodwomen are among the charactersmost likely to be both general and fatal victims of violence ratherthan the perpetrators. Good men have power as indicated by their heading up the killer-killed list good women, on the other hand, end up near the bottom of the power hierarchy. When it comes to violence, good are the strong men and the half-hearted 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 experience a heightened sense of danger, insecurity, and mistrust, or what we call the mean world 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.