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Click for stories about important media people: Dorothy Day: Social reform editor Dorothy DayDorothy Day believed in social reform -- racial justice, women's rights, fair wages, disarmament, prison reform. A pacifist, she opposed war. Eight times Dorothy Day went to jail for her beliefs. Her activism took journalistic form in the Catholic Worker, which she founded with her husband Peter Maurin in 1933. The newspaper, a tabloid visually distinctive for its woodcut art, became a mainstay in social reform movements. Its circulation reached 100,000 in less than a year. The Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day exemplified the mass media's potential to bring about change and leave the world a better place. Born in 1897, Dorothy Day was the daughter of an itinerant sports writer. The family moved a lot, so she developed an early picture of what the whole country was like, warts and all. At the University of Illinois she read Upton Sinclair's Kropotkin, which she credited with crystallizing her commitment to social justice. She moved to New York and wrote for the Socialist Call and then the Masses, alongside such radical thinkers as Max Eastman and John Reed. Her feeling for society's down-trodden became ever-keener. Meanwhile, an interest in Catholicism matured into her conversion. In 1932, in the middle of the Depression, Day and Peter Maurin developed a program of social action to bring scholars, workers and the needy together in houses of hospitality, farming communes and roundtable discussions -- and they created a newspaper to spread the word. Thus was born the Catholic Worker. The Day-Maurin movement took tangible form in Houses of Hospitality in many major cities. The poor could come for meals, lodging and moral support. These initiatives came to be called the Catholic Worker movement, and while Day was traversing the country to establish more Houses of Hospitality she also remained as publisher and editor of the Catholic Worker, stridently calling for reforms in labor law and other public policy to help poor people. At one point the paper's circulation reached 150,000. George GerbnerGeorge Gerbner worries a lot about media violence. And he's been doing this longer than just about anybody else. In 1967, Gerbner and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania created a television violence index and began counting acts of violence. Today, three decades later, the numbers are startling. Gerbner calculates the typical American 18-year-old has seen 32,000 murders and 40,000 attempted murders at home on television. In a dubious sense, there may be good news for those who fear the effects of media violence. Gerbner's index has found no significant change in the volume of violence since the mid-1970s. It may be maxed out. Gerbner theorizes that the media violence has negative effects on society. It's what he calls "the mean-world syndrome." As he sees it, people exposed to so much media violence come to perceive the world as a far more dangerous place than it really is. One of his concerns is that people become overly concerned for their own safety and, in time, may become willing to accept a police state to assure their personal security. That, he says, has dire consequences for the free and open society that has been a valued hallmark of the American lifestyle. Are there answers? Gerbner notes that the global conglomeration of mass media companies works against any kind of media self-policing. These companies are seeking worldwide outlets for their products, whether movies, television programs or music, and violence doesn't require any kind of costly translations. "Violence travels well," he says. Also, violence has low production costs. Gerbner notes that violence is an easy fill for weak spots in a television story line. Also, in television, violence is an effective cliff-hanger before a commercial break. While Gerbner's stats are unsettling, he has critics who say his numbers make the situation seem worse than it really is. The Gerbner index scores acts of violence without considering their context. That means when Bugs Bunny is bopped on the head, it counts the same as Rambo doing the same thing to a vile villain in a skull-crushing, blood-spurting scene. A poke in the eye on The Three Stooges also scores as a violent act. Despite his critics, Gerbner has provided a baseline for measuring changes in the quantity of television violence. Virtually every scholar cites him in the ongoing struggle to figure out whether media violence is something that should worry us all. © 1997, 1996, by John Vivian, Route 1, Box 32, Lewiston, Minnesota USA 55987-9706
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