Introduction George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory is an extremely important principle in public relations for several reasons. However, it also has negative as well as positive effects. Cultivation Theory, put simply, states that the more a person is exposed to a message provided by the media, the more likely that person is to believe the message is real. Cultivation Theory is often applied to people’s perceptions of reality. For example, a person who watches a lot of crime shows on television will eventually believe that there is a lot of violent crime in the city in which he lives. This skewed world is called a “mediated reality” (Wilcox et al, 2003, p.214). The theory also states that viewers who watch more television will be more influenced than those who watch less and that “the cumulative effect of television is to create a synthetic world that heavy viewers come to see as reality” (Reber and Chang, 2001).