About media violence and it’s effect in society—–The work of the late media scholar George Gerbner deserves our attention. Gerbner, who urged us to think about violence in more nuanced ways, found in study after study that heavy exposure to media cultivates what he called “the mean world syndrome” – a heightened state of paranoia, fear, and mistrust that often leads to a dangerously reactionary worldview. From this perspective, the point isn’t whether the Arizona tragedy can be linked to a single outside influence, but whether or not our increasingly paranoid political culture makes it more and more likely that violence like this will occur in the future. In the excerpt below from the film The Mean World Syndrome, Gerbner discusses why simplistic cause-and-effect explanations of violence miss the point – and why it’s so important to pay attention to how our news media, in particular, circulate extremist political rhetoric that cultivates fear.
