Gratitude from the MEF Team
We just wanted to extend our deepest thanks to you for using MEF films in your media education work.
Day in and day out, you share MEF films with your students and colleagues, organize campus and community screenings, and challenge people to think critically about how mainstream media narratives shape cultural and political attitudes and ideas.
We can’t thank you enough for doing this work — especially now, in the current political environment.
It’s very clear we’re in the midst of an intensifying political backlash against the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the movement for LGBTQ rights, and the very idea of multiculturalism itself. It’s also clear that this backlash is being fueled, at least in part, by the politically motivated spread of misinformation and fear-based appeals throughout the media.
All around us, we see examples of politicians and political operatives using a range of traditional and new media forms to channel people’s legitimate anxieties and fears about social and economic change into illegitimate fears of marginalized groups. And we see them doing this by taking advantage of a commercial media system that seems better equipped to inflame than to inform.
In a divisive and toxic political environment like this, media education isn’t just important, it’s essential — a critical bulwark against threats to democracy, rational public discourse, and civil society.
Thank you for being with us as we press on with new urgency.
In solidarity, and with deep gratitude,
The MEF team
