USC Annenberg's School of Communication director Larry Gross (pictured above) accepted the Roy F. Aarons Award for his contribution to education and research on issues affecting the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) communities, and journalism professor Joe Saltzman moderated a panel exploring the image of the war correspondent in movies and television Thursday at the 
Roy F. Aarons Award
Gross — a specialist in the areas of media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities — helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.
"We are proud to announce Larry Gross as the winner of the 2008 Roy F. Aarons Award," said Gary Hicks (pictured below left with Gross) of Southern Illinois. "Larry has done so much over the years and has been at the forefront of GLBT education and research." 
Said Gross: "This award is extra special because Roy Aarons meant so much to me personally and professionally."
Gross is the author of Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing (
Gross spent 35 years teaching communication at the
After earning degrees from
From 1971 to 1991, Gross co-directed the Cultural Indicators Project with George Gerbner, which focused on television content and its influence on viewer attitudes and behavior, introducing the theory of cultivation. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1998 and received the International Communication Association’s Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award in 2001. He is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association.
Gross has written and edited books covering a wide variety of issues in visual and cultural communication. In addition to the publications above, his editing credits also include Communications Technology And Social Policy (Wiley); Studying Visual Communication (University of Pennsylvania Press); Image Ethics: The Moral Rights Of Subjects In Photography, Film And Television (Oxford University Press); Image Ethics in the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press); On The Margins of Art Worlds (Westview Press); and the International Encyclopedia Of Communications (Oxford University Press).
The Roy F. Aarons Award honors individuals who have made significant contributions to the promotion and inclusion of GLBT materials in education and research. The award is named after Leroy F. Aarons, who shocked the news industry in 1990 when he acknowledged that he was gay at a conference for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. That announcement, in conjunction with the results from a landmark survey of gay and lesbian journalists, spearheaded the creation of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), an organization of journalists, media professionals, educators and students who work to foster fair and accurate coverage of GLBT issues.
"The Image of the War Correspondent in Popular Culture" (Joe Saltzman)
Saltzman, director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture at USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center, moderated a panel that explored the journalist as war correspondent in movies, television, graphic novels and fiction.
Saltzman played a 14-minute video compiled from a four-hour long IJPC video called "The Image of the War Correspondent in Movies and TV, 1931 to 2007." It showed clips of often-heroic journalists in movies such as The Green Berets (starring John Wayne), Ernie Pyle's The Story of G.I. Joe, and Blood Diamond.
Panelist Matthew Ehrlich (pictured below with panelists and Saltzman, far left) examined The Story of G.I. Joe and said Ernie Pyle is probably the most famous war correspondent of all time.
"The story of G.I. Joe is a film that in the words of Pyle's biographer 'blended myth and reality in about the same proportions as the movie that inspired it.'" Ehrlich said. "Even as both the movie and the real-life journalist showed the 'grim ironies' of war, they also suggested that the men fighting it on the ground were noble and that the press' proper place was on the men's side."
Panelist Howard Good discussed war correspondents in graphic novels, Norma Green spoke about the portrayal of women journalists in war zones in movies, and Sammye Johnson lectured on the female war correspondent in fictional books.
Johnson said there are biases that come along with being a female war correspondent in popular culture.
"You have trouble proving yourself as a woman in a male-dominated field," she said. "There seems to be an underlying theme in books that beautiful women are getting ahead because of their looks."
Saltzman said the journalist as war correspondent became a national folk hero in the 1940s.
Saltzman concluded: "The image of the war correspondent is one of the most exciting in all of popular culture — often glamorizing the profession but also occasionally showing the bravery and day-to-day toughness war correspondents have to have both in fiction and in real life."
