Movies: Media Education Foundation

In this era of Facebook privacy breaches, "fake news" and filter bubbles, this essential film trains its sights on the relationship between the internet and democracy. Tracing the internet's history as a publicly funded government project in the 1960...

Hollywood movies are rapidly becoming vehicles for the ulterior marketing and advertising motives of studios and their owners, rather than entertainment in their own right. Behind the Screens explores this trend toward "hypercommercialism" through p...

bell hooks is one of America's most accessible public intellectuals. In this two-part video, extensively illustrated with many of the images under analysis, she makes a compelling argument for the transformative power of cultural criticism....

For years, debates have raged among scholars, politicians, and concerned parents about the effects of media violence on viewers. Too often these debates have fallen into simplistic battles between those who claim that media images directly cause viol...

Sports media scholars look at the persistence of heterosexism and homophobia in perpetuating gender stereotypes. They argue for new media images which fairly and accurately depict the strength and competence of female athletes....

Robert McChesney lays the blame for the US's current state of affairs squarely at the doors of the corporate boardrooms of big media, which far from delivering on their promises of more choice and more diversity, have organized a system characterized...

The hallmarks of popular music - artist independence and diversity of voices - are threatened by a contracting marketplace of record companies, radio ownership and playlists, as well as increased use in advertising. Big-name artists, historians and e...

For years, right-wing politicians and pundits have repeatedly criticized the left for playing “the race card” and “the woman card.” This new film turns the tables and takes dead aim at the right’s own longstanding – but rarely discussed – deployment ...

Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the br...

Over the past few years, Israel's ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory and repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world—except the United States. This...

Jean Kilbourne's pioneering work helped develop and popularize the study of gender representation in advertising. Her award-winning Killing us Softly films have influenced millions of college and high school students across two generations and on an ...

In White Like Me, anti-racist educator Tim Wise explores race and racism in the US through the lens of whiteness and white privilege....

Celebrated author and Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin tackles the myth that the NFL was somehow free of politics before Colin Kaepernick and other Black NFL players took a knee....

Video and computer games represent a $6 billion a year industry. One out of every ten households in American owns a Sony Playstation. Children who own video game equipment play an average of ten hours per week. And yet, despite capturing the attentio...

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall offers an extended meditation on representation. Moving beyond the accuracy or inaccuracy of specific representations, Hall argues that the process of representation itself constitutes the very world it aims to represent...

NFL veteran Don McPherson examines how definitions of masculinity adversely affect women and create "blind spots" that hinder the healthy development of men. Using examples from his own life, and generously illustrated with clips from motion pictures...

How did the rise of LGBTQ visibility, political progress, and digital technologies in the 2000s come together to offer the abundance of complex queer and transgender representations we see today? Media scholar Katherine Sender shows how LGBTQ visibil...

In this highly anticipated update of the influential and widely acclaimed Tough Guise, pioneering anti-violence educator and cultural theorist Jackson Katz argues that the ongoing epidemic of men's violence in America is rooted in our inability as a ...

Wrestling with Manhood is the first educational program to pay attention to the enormous popularity of professional wrestling among male youth, addressing its relationship to real-life violence and probing the social values that sustain it as a power...

THE GREAT WHITE HOAX, featuring acclaimed anti-racist educator and author Tim Wise, explores how American political leaders of both parties have been tapping into white anxiety, stoking white grievance, and scapegoating people of color for decades to...