Gerbner's Model (George Gerbner, 1956)

A perception-first model: someone M perceives an event E as a percept E1, then through some means and controls produces a message SE about it; a receiver perceives that message as SE1. The message is never the event — it is a selected, mediated account.

Which piece of Shannon it adds back: perception and selection at both ends — E1 != E and SE1 != SE. Fidelity is doubly lossy, and the loss is a function of access, availability, and the communicator's control over the medium.

Transfer. Agent content is a message about something the agent perceived through training data — an E1 already at a remove from E — then compressed again into SE. Two lossy perceptions stack. This is precisely why agent output about lived, specific reality reads thin: it is a percept of a percept, mid by construction. Closing the gap means grounding in first-hand, verifiable detail to raise E1's fidelity, not producing a more fluent restatement of the low-fidelity percept.

Kin: models, shannon-weaver-model, lasswell-5w, slop-is-a-context-deficit, anti-mid