George Gerbner,
The Man

George Gerbner was originally a Hungarian poet who immigrated to the United States and attended school at Berkley in the field of journalism.  While working on his PhD at the University of Southern California, Gerbner wrote a paper titled "Toward a General Theory of Communication."  From this paper, cultivation theory was born.

In 1968, President Johnson's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed Gerbner to analyze the content of television shows. This was the beginning of the longest-running continuous media-research in the world--the Cultural Indicators Project (Stossel 1997).  Today, the project has an archive of  observations on more than 4,000 programs and 45,000 characters.  The research focuses on two major parts: (1) Message system analysis and (2) Cultivation analysis

Gerbner served as the Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania for 25 years until he retired in 1989.  He is currently the Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunications at Temple University.