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. Continue reading