Media Education Foundation

The Media Education Foundation (MEF) is a nonprofit organization that produces and distributes educational videos designed to promote critical thought, conversations, and activism about media and culture. Founded in 1991 by University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Sut Jhally, the organization takes up issues of media consolidation, consumer culture, and media depictions. Its mission is “to answer the challenge posed by the radical and accelerating corporate threat to democracy,” according to a recent catalog and brochure. The videos typically feature footage from the media content in question (e.g., music videos, news coverage, television programs, video games, etc.), deconstructed by experts, scholars, and activists who discuss research findings and make critical observations pertaining to the topic.

Professor Jhally's first video, Dreamworlds, was an incisive critique of the music video industry and its depiction of women and girls. A legal move to stop its distribution, which was later withdrawn, brought considerable media attention to his research and inspired the creation of the Media Education Foundation. Now, staff at MEF estimate that more than 2 million college students have seen the popular video; a third updated installment, titled Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex, and Power in Music Videos, was released in 2006. The MEF catalog currently includes dozens of videos, with new titles continually in the works.

Among the other bestsellers in the MEF catalog are the Killing Us Softly videos, featuring media critic Jean Kilbourne's critical assessment of gender in advertising. The third installment in the series, Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women, was released by MEF in 2000. Another top seller is Tough Guise: Violence, Media, & the Crisis in Masculinity, in which Jackson Katz, a leading anti-violence educator who has worked with professional sports teams and other groups of men, raises issues of school and dating violence and the portrayal of masculinity in the media. Other MEF videos have taken on a wide range of social and cultural issues including (but not limited to) media representations of alcohol and drinking (Spin the Bottle), of social class (Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class), of body and beauty (Slim Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession With Thinness), and of gays and lesbians (Off the Straight and Narrow: Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals & Television).

Another MEF production Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire, released in 2004, discussed U.S. foreign policy and media coverage of the events of September 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq. It met with widespread critical acclaim. The video also expanded the audience for MEF videos beyond the usual high school and college or university setting. Hijacking Catastrophe opened in select movie theaters across the country, was reviewed in a number of mainstream and alternative media outlets, and has sold an unprecedented number of copies.

MEF also offers free educational resources on its website for educators to use in the classroom as supplements to the videos. Discussion questions, media literacy activities, summaries of the topics covered in the videos, exercises for research and writing, and links to additional sources are available. In addition to those resources, the MEF website features interviews with media scholars and activists, news updates, and clips from each of the organization's videos.

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