This Colorado school bus carries
advertising as well as children.
“Our decision to advertise on Channel One was made only after a thorough review
of the programming and its benefits to schools and school children” |
Channel One has survived
a decade of criticism over a daily TV show for schools in the U.S., where advertisers
are ready to pay premium rates to reach youthful audiences
 Ten years ago, a commercial revolution
began in U.S. classrooms. After a 1989 test run, Channel One debuted in the spring
of 1990 in 400 secondary schools across the country. It was the brainchild of Christopher
Whittle, a brash media entrepreneur from Tennessee who had built an empire by dreaming
up new ways to expose Americans to advertising and marketing.
“Were this a perfect world, we would agree that government, not commercials, should
provide this technology and programming,” Mr. Whittle said at the time. He frequently
quipped that students believed “Chernobyl is Cher’s full name”–proof that they were
in dire need of relevant current-events programming.
Channel One wasn’t the first case of advertising in the schools. American students
were accustomed to seeing athletic scoreboards sponsored by Coca-Cola or Pepsi, advertisements
in yearbooks, and newspaper-in-education programmes. But the daily classroom news
show for teenagers was something different, and it caused quite a stir. The basic
offer was this: Channel One provided schools with a satellite dish, a videotape recorder,
wiring, and a television monitor in each classroom to show the 12-minute daily programme,
which includes two minutes of advertising. Schools signed a contract guaranteeing
that they would show Channel One to most students virtually every school day.
12,000
schools
The schools could use
the in-school video network for other purposes, such as producing their own local
student news shows, or to run educational documentaries. Critics called it a bargain
with the devil. Schools were ceding control of a small part of their class time,
and providing advertisers with access to students’ attention in unprecedented fashion,
they said.
Many educators did fight the concept. Virtually every major education group in the
United States passed resolutions opposing Channel One. Some states, such as New York,
banned it outright in public schools while others threatened to withhold school funding
for the two minutes per day schools gave over to advertisers.
But at the time, the United States was in the throes of an education reform movement
that favoured decentralized control and school-based decision-making. And many local
school boards and school principals decided they would accept the video equipment.
Some found the news show informative at a time when few teenagers picked up a newspaper
or tuned into network television news. And the commercials were rarely different
from the ones students saw thousands of times watching television at home.
Before long, Whittle Communications had wired some 12,000 schools, and eight million
students in U.S. middle and high schools were watching Channel One daily. Although
Channel One became profitable, the classroom news show couldn’t save Mr. Whittle’s
crumbling media empire. He sold Channel One in 1994 to K-III Communications Corp.,
now known as Primedia Inc. Meanwhile, with the ground broken by Channel One, American
companies and advertisers have come up with many new forms of commercial messages
in and around schools:
• Major soda bottlers such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola
vie for exclusive beverage contracts with school districts, so they can place logo-laden
soda machines on campuses and share revenue with the schools.
• Time and Newsweek magazines and The New York
Times publish special newsmagazines for elementary and secondary school classrooms,
most of which carry advertising.
• A mathematics workbook published by McGraw-Hill,
a major textbook publisher, caused a stir last year because of its use of product
trade names and logos in word problems. The publisher said it was trying to make
the texts more relevant to students.
• In a venture modeled somewhat after Channel One,
a California company called ZapMe! Corp. provides schools with a package of free
computers and an Internet connection as long as they agree to have students use them
at least four hours a day. ZapMe! carries advertising targeted at students.
Channel One’s news content comes in for heavy scrutiny. The tone of its daily show
has see-sawed over the years between an emphasis on hard news and serious topics
and what some educators derided as a too light, pop culture orientation. In recent
years, however, the show has emphasized social issues of interest to teenagers and
world reports. “I think that if you went back to the early 1990s what you would have
seen is more of a headline approach,” said Paul Folkemer, Channel One’s executive
vice president for education. “Our present strategy has a more in-depth look, with
more of a teaching side to it.”
The January 4, 2000, programme was fairly typical. Fresh into the new millennium,
Channel One offered an extended report on the surprise resignation of Russian President
Boris Yeltsin. It interviewed national security experts and dug up video of a 1997
visit to Russia by its own correspondent, including shots of Russian citizens selling
their belongings in the streets. Other elements of the day’s show included a pop
quiz, a regular feature designed to engage students in the classroom, a report about
the conclusion of an airliner hijacking in India, and two commercial breaks. Among
the advertisements on this day were one for Juicy Fruit gum and two “public service
announcements”: an anti-drug message and one warning young people about potential
dangers on the Internet.
“I have a role every day in the discussion of what we are going to air. I’ve tried
to link all of our materials to national education standards,” explains Dr. Folkemer,
a former school principal. Dr. Folkemer considers himself Channel One’s equivalent
of a school district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, who typically oversees
what is taught and which books and tests are used. The United States has no federally
mandated curriculum standards, but groups for virtually all school subjects have
developed voluntary standards. Dr. Folkemer has emphasized several initiatives that
show up on Channel One. Teaching the News, for example, helps educators identify
which subjects the Channel One news report will relate to on a given day.
Another initiative is The Power of One, which includes a series of stories that stress
the difference that one individual can make. Last November, for example, Channel
One featured a Virginia high school student who started a project to raise money
to provide goats for families in strife-torn Rwanda. A Channel One reporter, Tracy
Smith, traveled to Rwanda last year to report on the receiving end of the charitable
project. Her report also explained the background to the conflict among Rwandan ethnic
groups. Such foreign reporting forays are a staple of Channel One, and some observers
give the network credit for its emphasis on world news. In 1998, Brill’s Content,
a national magazine of media criticism, lauded Channel One for providing a more substantive
report on the Indonesian political crises than NBC Nightly News, one of the major
national news programmes, did on the same day.
But William Hoynes, a professor of sociology at Vassar College, criticizes the news
content. An analysis of 36 programmes found that only about 20 per cent of airtime
was devoted to coverage of news stories, with the rest of the time filled with a
news quiz, weather, sports and Hollywood gossip. His research, conducted with a media
expert, concluded that the channel’s “real function is not journalistic but commercial.”
Hoynes also criticizes the channel’s reporting style. “The anchors are cast as adventurers
who travel the world for a good story,” he said. “It focuses the news and the drama
on the individual personalities instead of the issues and events. . . Channel One
news serves as a promotional vehicle for itself and for youth culture and style,”
Hoynes added. This approach, not incidentally, promotes a friendly environment for
advertising, he believes.
Reaching
the teen market
Without a doubt, the
presence of advertising remains the most controversial aspect of Channel One. The
advertising debate had appeared to quieten down until early 1999, when several prominent
American conservatives joined with longtime liberal critics of commercialism in schools.
This coalition successfully lobbied a U.S. Senate committee to hold an oversight
hearing on school commercialism that was focused almost entirely on Channel One.
Although there was no serious prospect of federal legislation on the issue, the May
1999 hearing was nevertheless a dramatic confrontation between Channel One’s proponents
and its legion of critics. Despite their decision to co-operate, liberals and conservatives
have distinct concerns. The latter tend to focus on the contents of the programme,
objecting to a variety of pop culture references such as a riff of music from the
shock rocker Marilyn Manson or ads for R-rate movies, restricted because they contain
sex or violence. Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Eagle Forum, and a prominent
conservative activist, called Channel One a “devious device to enable advertisers
to circumvent parents.”
The liberal attack on Channel One is from the perspective of consumers versus advertisers
and big business, arguing that corporate advertisers should not be able to buy access
to children’s minds in school and that public schools should not abdicate control
of class time to commercial interests. Ralph Nader, an American liberal icon, called
Channel One “the most brazen marketing ploy in the history of the United States.”
The programme conveys a message of materialism, Mr. Nader said, and it “corrupts
the integrity of schools and degrades the moral authority of schools and teachers.”
A year ago, Commercial Alert, a consumer organization affiliated with Mr. Nader,
wrote to all the major advertisers on Channel One, urging them to end their sponsorship
of the show.
The letters cited four main concerns: Channel One forces children to watch the ads;
it wastes valuable class time (in 1998, two researchers asserted that the two minutes
of time devoted to commercials in Channel One’s 12,000 schools was costing those
schools some $300 million in lost time); it wastes taxpayers’ dollars for education;
and its content is under the control of its producers and not of parents or elected
school boards. Most advertisers did not even respond to the letter, much less agree
to drop their advertising. One company that did respond was Nabisco, which has advertised
Bubble Yum gum on the show. “Our decision to advertise on Channel One was made only
after a thorough review of the programming and its benefits to schools and school
children,” the company wrote to Commercial Alert. “We do not believe evidence supports
the charge that two minutes of daily advertising is putting our children’s future
at risk.”
Advertisers such as Nabisco, Pepsi, Proctor & Gamble (with ads for Clearasil
skin cream and Pringles potato chips), movie studios and the U.S. Armed Forces (for
recruitment) pay premium rates (up to $200,000 for a 30-second spot) to reach Channel
One’s audience of eight million students. As the channel’s advertisement to media
buyers puts it, the show “is viewed by more teens than any other programme on television.”
Another industry advertisement refers to the channel as “the smartest place to reach
tweens.” Tweens is a Madison Avenue term for children 9-14 years old, a coveted demographic
group. “Many children and especially teens are difficult for advertisers to reach,”
said Gary Ruskin, the director of Commercial Alert. “So the product hawkers are going
where the kids are–where they are forced to be, in school.”
New
outlets
Channel One executives
paint the advertising critics as a loud but small group that is pushing tired old
arguments. “I don’t know of anyone who is an advocate of simply commercialism,” said
Andy Hill, Channel One’s president of programming. “The debate has been about two
minutes of advertising and not about 10 minutes of good programming. Our critics
tend not to be people in schools.” Roy Lewis, a teacher in California, asserted that
“what Channel One does so beautifully is provide background.” But critics point out
that there are other ways of bringing news into the school: CNN has developed an
ad-free newscast for the classroom, but the cable station does not offer schools
the equipment to go along with it.
Now Channel One’s journalism is moving beyond the classroom. It recently began submitting
twice-monthly reports to a morning television news show on CBS television. It has
similar projects in the works for the MTV cable channel and a new women’s cable network
called Oxygen. Channel One is developing a media literacy curriculum for schools,
and its website, which has long supplemented the TV show with additional information,
quizzes, and the like, is getting an infusion of spending.
Primedia, which publishes such magazines as Seventeen, Soap Opera Digest, and Automobile,
does not disclose revenues for Channel One. But Simba Information Inc., which tracks
spending on educational media, estimates that Channel One and a sister unit that
sells documentaries to schools had revenues of $118.5 million in 1999.
Primedia recently sold off some of its educational properties, including the venerable
American classroom magazine, My Weekly Reader. There has been speculation that the
company wanted to divest itself of Channel One as well, but the company has a new
chief executive officer, Tom Rogers, who came from the NBC television network. Mr.
Rogers seems to be intent on keeping Channel One and fitting it into a media future
in which television, the Internet, and education are expected to merge in new forms.
• www.channelone.com
• For criticism of Channel One and other forms of school commercialism, see www.obligation.org
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