After 28 Years, Channel One Stops Broadcasting into Schools
Radio Commentary, 90.7, 91.7 New Life FM, August 10, 2018 – By Sue Ella Deadwyler
For the last 28 years, Channel One has aired a commercial twelve-minute non-academic television program into schools for children in grades six through twelve. Ten minutes of each program were dedicated to youth-specific news that was designed, carefully, by Channel One for use in classrooms.
Participating schools were given 19-inch television sets for each class of 23 students who would be shown special youth-specific television programming 180 days of the school year or 90 percent of the total days schools were in session.
Their take-advantage-of-captive-audiences strategy became obvious with this braggadocios comment from Channel One’s president: “The advertiser gets kids who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing with Nintendo.”
No doubt, Channel One’s intent was to take advantage of classroom children, and they did. By 1990 the captive audience included about 40 percent of all 11- to 18-year-old students, meaning almost half of grade schools had contracted with Channel One to show ten-minute versions of news and two minutes of commercials created for impressionable children to absorb in school classrooms.Soon, that in-school programming was opposed by parents, School Administrators, State School Officers, Boards of Education, the PTA, and the NEA. Channel One was saturating students with advertising about junk food; chat rooms and ‘Personal Ads’ message boards; movies such as Eddie Murphy’s ‘Holy Man’ and Adam Sandler’s ‘The Water Boy,’ and movies with sexually suggestive content and ultra-violent themes. Channel One programming exposed students to ads about sexualized magazines and sexually explicit music with violent lyrics by a satanic rock band.
A decade later Channel One – evidently responding to complaints – modified its content after a 1999 resolution by the Southern Baptist Convention pinpointed some of the problems. Following that resolution, Channel One announced a plan to screen ads for age-appropriate PG-13 movies and, appropriately, gave the Southern Baptist Convention credit for the change.
This summer, after 28 years, Channel One announced they’ll pick up their televisions and stop broadcasting youth-specific programs into schools. But I’m concerned that classroom students in 40 percent of this nation’s schools were subjected to non-academic programming and commercialism on 90 percent of the total number of school days for 28 years. If that twelve minutes had been used to teach phonics on 90 percent of the days schools were in session, maybe high school graduates would be better readers. For Georgia Insight I’m Sue Ella Deadwyler, your Capitol correspondent.