Gerbner And Archetypes

1. After watching the documentary, I believe Gerbner described the commercial media as the "storyteller" because a small group of "global conglomerates" control how a story is presented to the masses. These powerful companies control the narrative and use their power to force "creative" types to acquiesce to their vision. This is significant as Mr. Gerbner is describing a form of censorship behind the scenes at major companies which could be problematic as a select group of executives are deciding what is acceptable in the media. Furthermore, according to Mr. Gerbner, the media has become the biggest source of "storytelling" in our life surpassing our family, religion, and other forms of art. This is also an important point because it means
The big movie companies use humour and entertainment to make the public accept grotesque levels of violence in movies. I found the "Pulp Fiction" example in the documentary to be interesting because the scene with Samuel Jackson and John Travolta in the car is one that I remember quite vividly. In the scene, John Travolta's character used humor to lighten the mood after he just shot a guy in the head. This can change the nature of storytelling because people are more comfortable with excessive violence if their is some humor attached. For example, I would not enjoy the scene if he just shot the guy without making a joke or an attempt to lighten the mood. Instead, it would have been just pointless violence in my eyes (Morgan et al.,
According to the documentary, people, in general, are not exposed to persons of different races and backgrounds. Therefore, they rely on television to give them an idea of what "others" are really like in the "real world." The problem with this is that the media continually depicted minorities in a negative light in various movies and TV shows. In the documentary, they used the example of Hispanic Americans be portrayed as foreigners or criminals. This type of media coverage in TV shows and "the news" contributes to creating "mean people" and reinforce racist attitudes (Morgan et al., 2010). Since some people never met people from other races they will continue to use what they see in the media as a true