Channel One News
In 2006, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that research indicated that children who watched Channel One remembered the commercials more than they remembered the news.
Buzz Andersen told me once about this thing he remembers from high school where every day during class, the teacher had to turn on the TV and everybody had to watch some news programming which had been heavily subsidized by corporate interests and was supported by advertising and product placement. And this was in public school. I was incredulous, but it turns out to be true, and so beautiful in an Infinite Jesty kind of way. From the wiki:
Channel One was founded in 1989 and began with a pilot program in four high schools before its national rollout in 1990…It was founded by Christopher Whittle, a business executive based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Primedia purchased Channel One for approximately $250 million from Whittle in 1994.
Another choice bit:
Channel One’s contract with schools requires that the 15-minute program must be shown on 90% of all regular school days. The teachers are also instructed to make sure students watch the complete program and leave the volume at an audible level throughout the whole program, including the advertising content.
Today, I was reminded of this by the uproar over the Department of Education’s plan to distribute Obama’s upcoming address to students. I’ll add no editorial commentary to this.
UPDATE: ADM saw this and wrote a fantastic response recounting how he learned to deal with Channel One as a high school teacher in the Bronx five years ago.
While Channel One’s means of delivery is entirely suspect and arguably corrupt, the quality of the programming is quite good. They know their audience well, and they also know how to do real reporting.
On a couple of occasions early on, I tried to engage my kids in a discussion about the ethics of Channel One, their being a captive audience to the commercials, and so on. This was early in my teaching career and I didn’t really know what I was doing teaching-wise yet, and/so/but the conversation never got off the ground: the kids had literally no idea what I was talking about or why it was something I thought they should possibly be concerned about. Their frames of reference were, for the most part, entirely different, and I was unsuccessful in changing that in that would-be dialogue.
Later on, I had a much more successful conversation with them about biases in the media, and I got them talking about the impact that, for example, an oil company advertising in the newspaper could have on the stories about the oil industry in that newspaper. I can’t quite remember, but I think I turned this into something like, “So what if Channel One was running ads about video games, and then ran a story about how video games are good for kids?” I can’t recall the specifics, but I do remember being happy when the kids began understanding and discussing the concept of media bias.
