Media Education Foundation

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.

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 documentary takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S.

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 breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.

In this highly anticipated sequel to his groundbreaking, ADVERTISING AND THE END OF THE WORLD, media scholar Sut Jhally explores the devastating personal and environmental fallout from advertising, commercial culture, and rampant American consumerism. Ranging from the emergence of the modern advertising industry in the early 20th century to the full-scale commercialization of the culture today, Jhally identifies one consistent message running throughout all of advertising: the idea that corporate brands and consumer goods are the keys to human happiness. He then shows how this powerful narrative, backed by billions of dollars a year and propagated by the best creative minds, has blinded us to the catastrophic costs of ever-accelerating rates of consumption.

Social and developmental psychologist and author Lynn Phillips explores the line between consent and coercion in this thought-provoking look at popular culture and the ways real girls and women navigate their heterosexual relationships and hookups.

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 economists explain how popular music is produced and marketed and critique its current state.

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, and explores how the shared language of a culture, its signs and images, provides a conceptual roadmap that gives meaning to the world rather than simply reflecting it. Hall's concern throughout is the centrality of culture to the shaping of our collective perceptions, and how the dynamics of media representation reproduce forms of symbolic power.

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 by a lack of competition, homogenization of opinion and formulaic programming.

The #MeToo movement has shined much-needed light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and abuse and created unprecedented demand for gender violence prevention models that actually work. THE BYSTANDER MOMENT tells the story of one of the most prominent and proven of these models - the innovative bystander approach developed by pioneering scholar and activist Jackson Katz and his colleagues at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society in the 1990s.

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 of white-male identity politics in American presidential elections. Ranging from Richard Nixon’s tough-talking, law-and-order campaign in 1968 to Donald Trump’s hyper-macho revival of the same fear-based appeals in 2020, "The Man Card" shows how the right has mobilized dominant ideas about manhood and enacted a deliberate strategy to frame Democrats and liberals as soft, brand the Republican Party as the party of “real men,” and position conservatives as defenders of white male power and authority in the face of transformative demographic change and ongoing struggles for racial, gender, and sexual equality.

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 1960s to its full-scale commercialization today, the film traces how the revolutionary, democratizing potential of the internet has been radically compromised by the growing and unaccountable power of a handful of telecom and tech monopolies.

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 phenomena such as product placement, tie-ins, merchandising and cross-promotions. It combines multiple examples taken directly from the movies with incisive interviews provided by film scholars, cultural critics, political economists, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Behind the Screens presents an accessible argument designed for school and college-age audiences-- precisely the demographic most prized by both Hollywood studios and advertisers alike. It features examples drawn from movies such as Wayne's World, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Summer of Sam, and Toy Story.

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 violence and those who argue that activists exaggerate the impact of media exposure. Based on interviews conducted with George Gerbner before his death in 2005, the film urges us to think about media effects in more nuanced ways. In contrast to behaviorist models that see media violence as causing real-world violence, and limited effects models that question the impact of media altogether, Gerbner encourages us to move outside the frame of this debate to consider how the repetitive stories media tell constitute a pervasive cultural environment - a landscape of ritualized, often violent images that have the power to cultivate how we see and understand the world.

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 international scale. In this important new film, Kilbourne reviews if and how the image of women in advertising has changed over the last 20 years. With wit and warmth, Kilbourne uses over 160 ads and TV commercials to critique advertising's image of women. By fostering creative and productive dialogue, she invites viewers to look at familiar images in a new way, that moves and empowers them to take action.

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

Consumer capitalism dominates our economy, our politics, and our culture, even though a growing body of research suggests it may be well past its sell-by date. In this illustrated presentation based on his latest critically acclaimed book, media scholar Justin Lewis makes a compelling case that consumer capitalism can no longer deliver on its promise of enhancing quality of life, and argues that changing direction will require changing our media system and our cultural environment. After showing how consumer capitalism has become economically and environmentally unsustainable, Lewis explores how our cultural and information industries make it difficult to envision other forms of human progress by limiting critical thinking and keeping us locked in a cycle of consumption. And he argues that change will only be possible if we take culture seriously and transform the very way we organize our media and communications systems.

This compelling new documentary focuses on the sexual dilemmas and difficult life choices young girls face as they come of age in contemporary American culture. Challenging long-held myths about girlhood, the film draws on the insights of girls themselves to explore and shed light on their actual lived experience as they navigate our increasingly hyper-sexualized society.

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.

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 attention of millions of children worldwide, video games remain one of the least scrutinized cultural industries. Game Over is the first educational documentary to address the fastest growing segment of the media through engaging questions of gender, race and violence. Game Over offers a refreshing dialogue about the complex and controversial topic of video game violence, and is designed to encourage high school and college students to think critically about the video games they play. - See more at: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=205#sthash.f6Cram5T.dpuf

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, McPherson leads us beyond the blind spots of traditional masculinity and toward solutions that engage men in dialogue.