Page 74 - Middle Georgia State University - Knighted 2019

crimes, white males were more likely to commit violent crimes, and no statistical significance
could be found in violence victimization.

In her analytical journal of the culture of the writers’ room, Henderson (2011) focuses
mainly on interactions amongst members of the room. She explains how, due to the
“sociocultural rituals” of the writers’ room, we create “situational authorship,” a term Henderson
defines as “a process of collective decision-making” (Henderson 2–3). Because of this collective
decision-making, writers in the writers’ room tend to cast off or “Other” (Henderson 3) other
writers, due to issues such as ideas in writing, their physical needs or limitations, willingness to
trash talk, as well as their gender or race, not to mention the “Uni-Culturalism” that occurs
because of it (Henderson 8).

Finally, in a study similar to Gerbner’s, Callanan (2012) sets out to answer two questions:
“(1) how do various types of crime-related media influence fear of crime, and (2) do media
effects differ by race/ethnicity?” (3). To answer this question, Callanan surveyed a total of 4,245
California residents in a state-wide area between March and September of 1999. Surveyors were
asked to rate eight items on a scale from 1 to 10 for how fearful they were of the crime. The
responders were asked to rate the likelihood of seven crimes on a scale from 0 to 10 (0 counting
as not at all). Finally, responders were asked to how often they read the newspaper or watched
the local news. After the surveys were tallied and measured, results found that, of course, the
more television news and crime-reality programs consumed, the higher the fear of crime, and
fear is higher “among victims, women, blacks, and Latinos; education, income, and age are
negatively associated. Local news consumption elevates the fear of neighborhood crime, but not
any other media.” Consumption of local news as well as crime-reality TV increased fear of crime
across all races/ethnicities, whereas newspapers heightened fear among whites more than any

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