George Gerbner: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. Michael Morgan. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2012. 197 pp. $34.95 pbk.Michael Morgan, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is certainly well positioned to write an intellectual history of George Gerbner. He was a student, colleague, and co-author of Gerbner's since 1975, when he began his graduate studies at the Annenberg School. In 2002, he edited a special collection of Gerbner's writing that was organized in a way that revealed Morgan's special understanding of the challenges as well as the critical contributions that Gerbner, who died in 2005, had made to communication theory and research. This little book takes the next big step along the path toward making those contributions accessible to a wider audience within communications, and within the social sciences and humanities more generally.While I also claim Gerbner as a teacher, advisor, and colleague for whom much of his writing is quite familiar, I still gained valuable insights from Morgan's framing of the tensions within his work and in relation to prominent debates within and surrounding the field. Morgan begins his analytical review with Gerbner's model of communication, and here, as throughout, he underscores Gerbner's determination that his work would be critical-a value-oriented, normatively structured alternative to what he saw as administratively oriented techniques of manipulation, persuasion, and attitude change. Morgan underscores the importance that Gerbner placed on the need for regulatory control of media in the sphere of production in order to ensure that freedom and democracy could be enjoyed in the perceptual domain.Morgan suggests the possibility that it was Gerbner's reaction to growing up under fascism that led to his insistence that democracy requires that private media be regulated by government in order to serve the public interest. There undoubtedly are a great many other historical, theoretical, and even ideological influences on Gerbner's approach to critical social research. Morgan uses many of these influences in describing Gerbner's continually evolving approach to understanding how the transformation of social relations results from the production, distribution, and consumption of the products of an industrialized, commercial culture. This process would come to be referred to as cultivation.However, before he takes us there, Morgan provides a quite detailed introduction to Gerbner's early research and the numerous collaborative research projects that served as a bridge to the Cultural Indicators Project, for which Gerbner is most widely known. One of those projects, funded by the federal Office of Education, was a massive, internationally comparative analysis of the images of teachers in popular media in the United States and ten other nations. Morgan identifies this project as Gerbner's first major systematic content analysis. Gerbner's approach to systematic, quantitative content analysis was shaped by another large, internationally comparative analysis of the film hero. …