THE CULTIVATION THEORY: A RESEARCH REGARDING THE
TELEVISION’S CULTURAL ROLE
1. INTRODUCTION
The theme of this presentation is the role of the television on people’s perception of the world and the social reality. Aiming at this, an analysis on the prime time news was made so as to determine the contents of television and a field study was conducted to introduce the way of public perception. Then the relation between these two was investigated. The research was done utilizing the Cultural Indicators Project developed by George Gerbner. The reason to have chosen the Cultural Indicators Project is that it introduces the holistic role of the television. In this presentation, firstly, the Message System and Cultivation Analysis, which are the components of Cultural Indicators Project, and depending on cultivation, “mainstreaming” will be emphasized and then there will be an evaluation on the topic discussing the results of the study. Institutional Process Analysis of the project was not made because of the fact that it had been carried out in another study of the author (Özer, 2004).