[1][3] Being of Jewish descent, he fled to Paris in 1939 (after Kristallnacht) to avoid conscription into the Hungarian army, which was under a government allied with Nazi Germany.

[2][4] Initially, Gerbner was unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States, where his half-brother László Benedek[5] was a Hollywood filmmaker, instead having to travel first to Mexico, then Cuba.

Later, he would be transferred to the Office of Strategic Services and eventually arrived in Italy, where he joined the OSS' Secret Intelligence Branch.

After Germany’s defeat in the war Gerbner was sent to Austria in October 1945 to investigate a mass encampment of Hungarian soldiers, among which was the pro-Nazi prime minister of Hungary, Döme Sztójay, whom Gerbner helped arrest and return to Budapest to be tried and executed as a war criminal.

[1][2] Gerbner was diagnosed with cancer in late November, 2005, and died on December 24, 2005, at his apartment in Center City, Philadelphia.

In 1956, he became a faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign's Institute of Communication Research (1956–64),[3] where he had been recruited by Dallas Smythe, who met Gerbner as a visiting professor in USC’s Department of Cinema.

[2] In 1968, Gerbner established and headed the Cultural Indicators Project (CIP) to document trends in television programming and how these changes affect viewers' perceptions of society.

[2][5] In 1997, he became the Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunication at Temple University, where he continued to teach, research, and advocate through CEM.

In 1968, Gerbner established and headed the Cultural Indicators Project (CIP) to document trends in television programming and how these changes affect viewers' perceptions of society.

Gerbner testified before a Congressional Subcommittee on Communications in 1981, saying that: The most general and prevalent association with television viewing is a heightened sense of living in a 'mean world' of violence and danger.

Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures....