ABSTRACT
Each year for almost a decade George Gerbner and his associates at the Annenberg School of Communications have produced a report on depictions of violence on network television, entitled the Violence Profile. Gerbner's count of violent incidents, which is only one component of the overall Violence Index, has numerous and fatal deficiencies. Since 1969 Gerbner has made much of a statistic to which he variously refers as the "Victimization Ratio," "the Risk Ratio," the "Violence Victim Ratio," and which will here simply be called "RR." The violence tabulations for the 1976-77 season, covering 13 weeks of prime-time programming for each network, indicate that Columbia Broadcasting System and American Broadcasting Companies have remained at essentially the same level as last year. The amount of violence accounted for by made-for-TV and feature films also showed an increase, despite the fact that there was no increase in the amount of time devoted to films on the three networks.
