Schools Serve Up Junk TV Along with Junk Food to Students

Stealth TV
from American Prospect Magazine
Feb. 12, 2001

by Russ Baker

At Clifton High School, a mostly white, working-class institution in
suburban New Jersey, it's time for second period--and for Channel One, a
public-affairs TV broadcast available exclusively for school viewing.
Mounted high in a corner of every classroom--as omnipresent an icon as the
American flag--is a large-screen television set, provided by Channel One.
The face on the screen is that of school principal William Cannici. Speaking
into a microphone, he tries a few jokes, then announces student
vocational-award winners. In Mrs. Rossi's Spanish class, restless students
begin talking among themselves. Suddenly, the teacher shushes her charges:
It's show time.

The hip-hop music starts. Heads bounce to the beat. Cut to two young,
fashionably dressed anchorwomen, one white and one black. First up in the
news is a tough sell to almost any viewership: the census. Point: Without an
accurate count, schools can't get their rightful aid. The census form
flashes on the screen. "Hey, I got that!" remarks a student. Channel One's
reporter interviews a census spokesperson, a sexually ambiguous-looking
woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. "What the heck is that?" a
student in the back of the room asks with a chortle.

Time for a commercial break. Teens snowboard and dirt-bike their way through
the Mountain Dew life (170 calories, 46 grams of sugar per can): "Do the
Dew!" Then a Twinkies spot (150 calories, 14 grams of sugar per two-pack).

Back to the news. As a story airs about the pope's groundbreaking mea culpa
over the Catholic Church's transgressions toward the Jews, much of the class
is deep in chitchat; the teacher tries, without success, to silence the
talk. Other students appear to be doing their homework. Two young women are
checking their makeup, and four are resting their heads on their desks. Not
one person has a comment about the story, described by The New York Times as
"the most sweeping papal apology ever."

Another commercial break. As the first frames roll, a student shrieks,
"Pokémon!" Declares another: "I need to get that." Next ad: Join the
Marines. One viewer chimes along with the script: "The Few. The Proud... ."

For 10 years now, the folks behind Channel One have been able to offer
advertisers a dream demographic: a captive audience composed of nearly half
of all American teenagers. (And they truly are captive, as Carlotta and D.J.
Maurer, two students at Perrysburg Junior High School in Ohio, can attest.
Their refusal to watch Channel One in school bought them a day in the Wood
County Juvenile Detention Center.) On the condition that all teachers will
air and all students will watch its daily satellite-broadcast programs,
Channel One lends television sets and other equipment to schools. The
company, which claims to reach a teen market 50 times larger than MTV's,
profits by selling two of every 12 program minutes for commercials coupled
with call-in contests and cool banter.

As noxious as these school-sanctioned ads are, Channel One's success is part
of a larger trend toward in-school marketing: Textbook manufacturers insert
proprietary brand names into math equations, corporations provide book
covers emblazoned with their logos, soda companies entice school officials
into signing deals for on-campus product exclusivity, and companies donate
computers that have the ability, in some cases, to track the online behavior
of individual students. A whole new industry of consultants has sprung up to
help corporate clients position their products in schools.

Even in today's thoroughly commercialized environment, there is something
especially insidious about school-endorsed product pushing. For one thing,
schools are supposed to offer a haven from the worst the world has to offer.
We authorize metal detectors and locker sweeps to prevent deadly violence on
campus. But there are other dangers to impressionable minds. Channel One's
hyperkinetic blend of "current-affairs broadcasting" and carefully targeted
commercials blurs the line between fact and fiction, between reporting that
at least tries to be objective and the self-serving rhetoric of the
advertising business. Unquestionably, young people lack the media "literacy"
skills necessary to understand fully what they are dealing with: A recent
study cited in Education Week shows that ninth-graders who watched ads in
which professional athletes endorsed products thought the athletes had
themselves paid for the ads.

Channel What?

Few American adults have ever heard of Channel One--a remarkable fact,
considering that one in four middle and high schools now broadcasts it and
an estimated 40 percent of all high school students are compelled to watch
its programming every single school day. Perhaps parents do not know about
Channel One because their kids (some eight million of them, in 12,000
schools) do not tell them about it. As for the key American
institutions--governmental, educational--that might be expected to raise an
alarm, they have mostly been looking the other way.

Last fall the first-ever government study of commercialization in the
schools was published. The General Accounting Office (GAO) report, requested
by two Democrats--Representative George Miller of California and Senator
Christopher Dodd of Connecticut--notes that in-school marketing is
dramatically on the rise and that deals between schools and companies are
being made on a district-by-district basis. Local educators are not equipped
to negotiate with crafty marketers bearing freebies, much less to address
the larger educational issues. While the GAO study was being circulated, the
Federal Trade Commission released a report specifically condemning the
marketing of violent content to underage children.

In some ways, the "new" political interest in protecting our children from
the onslaught of the marketers harks back to 1989, when Channel One was
launched by entrepreneur Chris Whittle (later, in 1994, he sold the company
to K-III Communications, now called Primedia). Initially, the service faced
heavy criticism from liberal groups and from educational powerhouses such as
the national Parent-Teacher Association, the American Federation of Teachers
(AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), and various principals'
associations; even the American Academy of Pediatrics frowned upon
for-profit classroom television. But the well-financed company won over
school system after school system, and effective opposition dried up.

Of late, none of the major teachers' or school administrators' organizations
has seemed willing to mount a serious challenge to Channel One. Two years
ago, NEA officials told Channel One critics that while the association
remains opposed to the service, removing it from America's classrooms was
not a priority. The AFT offered a similar line. And the National Association
of School Principals rebuffed Channel One opponents several times when they
requested a meeting. As a result, the battle against Channel One is being
waged by several tiny public-interest groups and through scattered,
small-scale parent uprisings. The educational establishment apparently
believes that the issue lacks urgency.

Governmental bodies tend to accept the claim that the free equipment and the
"news value" of Channel One more than make up for any downside; besides, the
argument goes, local governments can address the matter if they so choose.
Even the GAO report declares that it is impossible to differentiate the
effects of bombardment by Channel One from those of the commercial messages
directed at young people outside school hours. Although the GAO researchers
were undoubtedly well-meaning, such a claim is a cop-out: Many in-school
marketers specially design ads, promotions, contests, and the like to track
the impact of their sales pitches.

Can anyone doubt that the ads on Channel One are grossly out of place in an
academic environment? Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media and culture
at New York University who studied Channel One's content in 1997, concluded
that its commercial messages reinforced bad body image, emphasized the
importance of buying things, and glamorized boorish and loutish behavior. To
ensure "stickiness," the ad campaigns often feature interactive components.
One that I saw urged students to watch a film called Never Been Kissed, then
to call in and answer questions about the movie's content in order to
qualify for a chance to win a $500 shopping spree and a watch.

Rather than defend the indefensible, Channel One insists that the ads are
not what matters. At the company's Madison Avenue headquarters, sleek,
gunmetal-silver placards fit for the starship Enterprise proclaim
"Education" and "Our Missions: To Inform and Empower Young People." These
displays imply that the ads are a necessary evil that makes possible a
bounty of fresh educational content and free equipment. Indeed, in a meeting
with me last year, Channel One officials sought repeatedly to focus
attention on the educational merits of their product. The company has been
able to orchestrate favorable publicity ranging from a laudatory New York
Times op-ed by a Catholic priest who is also a principal in a Channel One
school to supportive statements from the ordinarily populist Senator Paul
Wellstone of Minnesota.

Company executives claim that the broadcasts hold students' interest because
they deliver important information in an appealing manner. (The students
appear to identify with the youthful newscasters as stars; indeed, one of
them, Lisa Ling, has moved on to anchoring a commercial-network morning
show.) The solution to disaffection among youths, say executives, is to
deliver a product that shows them how world affairs are relevant to them and
their families. "We go to Kosovo and talk to kids who are their age," said
Susan Tick, an outside PR representative for Channel One. "You don't connect
with them otherwise."

Even by these standards, the compilation tape Channel One gave me was not
impressive: It included a segment summarizing the Bill Clinton impeachment
situation, delivered at a rapid-fire pace that seemed harder for an average
teen to follow than a conventional news broadcast. The commentary is often
self-promotional, with Channel One correspondents and anchors gushing about
how they've gotten to travel to exotic places, and with interviewed students
identified as attendees of "a Channel One school."

If we are to accept Channel One's request that it be judged on its news
content, we have to face the fact that there just isn't much there. Of the
10 minutes of "news," only two to three minutes is breaking news, according
to William Hoynes, a Vassar College sociologist who studies the intersection
of media and education. The remainder is a hodgepodge of contests,
self-promotion, light features and profiles, music intros, and pop quizzes.
And Hoynes concludes that even those paltry hard-news minutes frame the
issues in rigid terms that do not promote original thought or critical
thinking.

Not surprisingly, Channel One doesn't offer any statistics to prove that its
programs benefit students. "We have attitudinal studies showing that
teachers believe it to be productive," said Jeffrey Ballabon, a Channel One
executive vice president. "They know kids don't read newspapers. They also
don't watch the evening news." Perhaps the citation of "attitudinal"
evidence is necessitated by the findings of one study the company did
commission: A 1994 University of Michigan analysis found that students
performed just 5 percent better in high schools that aired the programs and
8 percent better in participating middle schools--and then only in an
"exemplary" (read: highly atypical) environment in which the teacher
actively sought to incorporate the broadcast content into the class and made
sure the students were paying attention. There was no measurable increase in
discussion of news outside the school or in efforts to seek out additional
information from outside news sources.

Nevertheless, most administrators and teachers seem to love their Channel
One. With good reason: The company provides TV sets and a broadcast system
that the schools use for their own purposes, including the principal's
morning addresses. "Our district is not a real wealthy district," explains
Lawrence Westerfield, principal of Mt. Healthy South Middle School in
Cincinnati, Ohio, which airs Channel One. If you want the technology, says
Westerfield, "you have to count on advertisers to pay."

Yet there is evidence that the schools aren't getting a very good deal. A
1998 study co-authored by Alex Molnar, an education professor at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, concluded that broadcasting Channel One
takes up six or seven days of instruction over the school year and costs
American taxpayers $1.8 billion annually. Molnar, who heads the Center for
Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation, compared the average cost of
12 daily minutes of a secondary school's time, or about $158,000 a year,
with the total value of Channel One's equipment ($17,000) and the annual
rental value of the equipment ($4,000). Even the value of the time spent
watching the two minutes of commercials ($26,000) exceeded the value of the
equipment. And those Channel One minutes add up. A child who views the shows
from sixth grade to graduation will lose seven weeks of school time.

Ad Nauseam

Despite Channel One's self-proclaimed educational mission, the company
offers a different story to advertisers. As Channel One's then-president
bragged to a youth marketing conference in 1994, "The biggest selling point
to advertisers [is that] ... we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of
commercials... . The advertiser gets a group of 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 Nintendo, who cannot have
their headsets on." Channel One continually conducts surveys about the
spending patterns of teens; and its Web site, heavily touted on the shows
themselves, provides an ideal means of obtaining direct feedback from the
students.

Channel One also makes much of its public-service announcements, including
those warning students to resist peer pressure to take drugs. Meanwhile, it
airs ads stressing ways to be cool and brags to advertisers that controlled
viewing in the classroom is the ideal way to play on teens' insecurity and
desire to fit in.

Channel One makes a lot of money--$346 million in 1999 ad revenues--for its
financially troubled parent company, Primedia, which reported a net loss of
$120 million that year. With an estimated $200,000 price per 30-second ad (a
rate comparable to the major networks'), Channel One is a crucial element in
the company's future strategy. In its 1999 stockholder report, Primedia
declared: "Our products serve highly specialized niches and capitalize on
the growing trend toward targeted rather than mass information distribution.
Many of the company's products, such as ... CHANNEL ONE NEWS, ... afford
advertisers with an opportunity to directly reach niche market audiences.
CHANNEL ONE NEWS has no direct competition in the schools [my emphasis] but
does compete for advertising dollars with other media aimed at teenagers."

With so vast a market at stake, Channel One has not been reluctant to spend
in order to protect its franchise. When Republican Senator Richard Shelby of
Alabama, an ally of the ragtag band of Channel One opponents, initiated
Senate hearings in 1999, Channel One dumped almost $1 million into a
lobbying effort led by former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed and
the powerful law firm of Preston, Gates, and Ellis--and effectively kept a
lid on further action or hearings. Last spring a Shelby-sponsored
sense-of-the-Senate resolution opposing commercialization of the schools was
blocked by Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and heavy lobbying by
Reed and former New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato. The company has other
means of winning support: Channel One's Ballabon insisted on faxing me a
mound of positive letters; several from students mentioned free trips to
Channel One's Los Angeles production studios.

Lined up against Channel One's PR juggernaut is a spirited and diverse
coalition that includes Professor Molnar's group; Ralph Nader's D.C.-based
Commercial Alert; the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, located
in Oakland, California; and Obligation, Inc., a group from Birmingham,
Alabama, headed by Republican businessman Jim Metrock. When Metrock found
out that his children were watching Channel One, he did his own study; he's
been a committed opponent ever since. He has helped recruit a number of
socially conservative groups--like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and James
Dobson's Focus on the Family--some of which are more concerned with what
they perceive as risqué content than with commercialism per se. In addition,
Channel One's critics convinced the 15.8-million-member Southern Baptist
Convention to pass a resolution in 1999 opposing the enterprise.

That's about it on a national scale. Channel One likes to keep the
battleground local, where school officials often lack the training and
policy sophistication to ask tough questions about content control and
educational philosophy. Thus far, only one state, New York, has banned
Channel One from the public schools.

Still, a few small districts have voted to bar Channel One, and Metrock says
that some teachers in schools contractually obligated to show the programs
are nevertheless switching them off. The company has apparently responded by
warning errant schools that it will its yank equipment. And Channel One has
now retained Nielsen Media Research to measure student viewing in 1,500
schools.

Sooner or later, it seems, educational advocates are going to have to make
Channel One and its ilk a priority. If we are really on the brink of a
top-to-bottom reconstitution of American education, then surely the
intrusion of corporate products must be addressed. And enthusiasm for these
new methods of "improving" the educational experience bears scrutiny if the
letters of support from teachers and principals that Channel One's Ballabon
forwarded to me are any evidence. Many contained the sorts of appalling
errors--in spelling, grammar, syntax, and exposition--that these educators
are supposed to be helping students avoid.

Were the topic ever to reach the national agenda, many vexing questions
about education itself would be raised. For example, Channel One advocates
contend that the broadcasts make it easier to teach young people about the
news because the young hosts know how to speak kids' language. This, of
course, suggests that adult educators (and parents, for that matter) are
incapable of discussing the ways of the world in a compelling manner--a
sentiment not everyone shares. And anyway, in an America awash in
exhortations to buy and consume, shouldn't institutions of learning and
discussion be free from the constant pressures toward superficiality and
conformity?

Meanwhile, Primedia has announced a merger with the Internet company
About.com, which has intricate business partnerships with pornography
purveyors. Conservatives are upset by that, as they are with Senator
Brownback, who is a leader in denouncing violence in the media yet
enthusiastically backs Channel One, with its advertising for violent movies.

This year opponents are likely to concentrate on challenging the federal
government's role as a major Channel One benefactor through its paid
advertising for the armed services and the Office of National Drug Control
Policy. But if there's strong, broad, untapped sentiment against the
juggernaut, it probably needs to coalesce fairly soon: Channel One officials
told me the company looks forward to rolling out the programs in thousands
of additional schools. ?

Kimberly Smith provided reporting assistance for this article.

Pop Quiz

Kathleen Ryan, a history teacher at Clifton High in New Jersey, believes
that Channel One is a helpful supplement to her lesson plans. "Although the
kids are like sitting ducks for the commercials," she says, "sometimes I see
Channel One seeping through when they talk about the news."

Several anecdotal studies by groups critical of Channel One found that
students retained virtually none of the news material when quizzed the
following day but did remember most of the commercial content. (Channel One,
sensitive to the criticism, has begun to offer schools additional,
commercial-free programming on topics such as science, drug prevention, and
sports.) Immediately after Clifton students viewed a Channel One news
program, we conducted our own quiz on the broadcast and on general knowledge
of current events. Here's what the students said.

Two females, ages 14 and 15 (interviewed together):

Q: For what is the pope apologizing?
A: He didn't say nothing about the Jews.

Q: What is the importance of the census?
A: I don't know why it is important. But it may help to know if someone
needs help bathing.

Q: Can you recall the commercials?
A: [They can name all except for the Marines' spot.]

Q: Why were there riots in Seattle a few months ago?
A: Don't know.

Q: What does WTO stand for?
A: Isn't that wrestling?

Q: What is your favorite commercial on Channel One?
A: The Twinkie one where the raccoon gets hit by the truck.

Male, age 16:

Q: What do you think about the verdict in the Diallo case?
A: Those four cops were not charged with nothing, and they should be.

Q: What do you know about Bob Jones University?
A: Nothing.

Q: Why were there riots in Seattle a few months ago?
A: Something to do with jobs.

Female, age 14:

Q: What is the importance of the census?
A: So you know how many people are in the world.

Q: For what is the pope apologizing?
A: I don't know. He went to the Holy Land.

Q: What is your favorite commercial on Channel One?
A: I wasn't paying attention.

Q: What do you think about the verdict in the Diallo case?
A: The cops should go to jail.

Q: Name two Democratic presidential candidates.
A: Bush and Gore.

Male, age 14:

Q: What is the importance of the census?
A: To find out population. Something to do with the economy and Congress.

Q: For what is the pope apologizing?
A: Pope John Paul let all the Jews die.

Q: Name two Democratic presidential candidates.
A: Dole, McCain.

Q: What is your favorite commercial on Channel One?
A: The Nike one with the guy running.

Female, age 16:

Q: Why do you like Channel One?
A: I get to do my homework in class.

Female, age 15:

Q: What do you know about Bob Jones University?
A: Interracial dating. George Bush just spoke there.

Q: Where did you learn about this?
A: Mr. Grohl, my English teacher. He always talks about it.

Q: Name two Democratic presidential candidates.
A: I do not know.

Female, age 16:

Q: What is your favorite commercial on Channel One?
A: I like the sticky-film one. All the kids in my class always sing along
together.

Q: Why were there riots in Seattle a few months ago?
A: No idea.

Q: What does WTO stand for?
A: No idea.

Female, age 18:

Q: What is your favorite commercial on Channel One?
A: The antidrug one. It's funny. People laugh at it.

Q: Why were there riots in Seattle a few months ago?
A: Don't know.

Q: Name two Democratic presidential candidates.
A: Gore, Bush. Don't know their first names. I am into politics but I can't
remember.

Q: For what is the pope apologizing?
A: Pope Pius never stood up and did nothing. That is what the pope is
apologizing for.

Q: How did you learn about this?
A: I'm Catholic. I just did a research paper on it.

Male, age 17:

Q: For what is the pope apologizing?
A: People don't believe in what he believes. Something like that.

Q: Name two Democratic presidential candidates.
A: McCain and Bradley.

Q: Why were there riots in Seattle a few months ago?
A: Trade organization or something. Workers.

Q: How do you know about this?
A: I saw it on the news at home.

Q: What is your favorite commercial on Channel One?
A: The guy running around with the boom box. Nike.

--Russ Baker and Kimberly Smith

Russ Baker