Cultivation Analysis
Continued...

produce, easy to distribute--violence is the surest road to profit" (1997).  Second, people may have a tendency to filter out good news as a function of evolution.  Those creatures who were more alert to their surroundings and possible dangers, tend to live longer, and were able to pass this trait on to their offspring.  In an effort to increase our chances of self preservation, we become acutely aware of dangers and 'bad news' so as to take measures to avoid them, keep ourselves safe from them, and in turn, preserve a long and healthy life. 

Cultivation theory does take into consideration that television is not the only influence on a viewer's perception of the world.  Demographics, social, personal, and cultural aspects play a factor in how a viewer will interpret television programming, but Gerbner explains that what is means to be a certain ethnicity, race, gender or age are themselves defined by cultivation.  Television helps to define what it means to be
Those things in our society, according, in part, to the images

and ideologies portrayed on television.  Television helps to redefine what our place in society is as we grow, and go through the stages of life.  It is a continuous process.  People are also influenced differently by television according to their established beliefs and where they are in their lives.  They may pull to one side or the other, but cultivation states that all groups are affected by the same central messages.  "Cultivation thus implies the steady entrenchment of mainstream orientations in most cases and the systematic but almost imperceptible modification of previous orientations in others; in other words, affirmation for the believers and indoctrination for deviants.  That is the process we call mainstreaming" (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, 1986).