The Case Against Channel One in the Classroom

“Out-of-home TV has become commonplace,” as Richard Mahler observed in “No Place to Hide” (Calendar, Aug. 6), but not without the notice and opposition of educators when it comes to sneaking ads into our schools. Mahler’s article about “Place-Based Viewing--TV as an Invasive Force” included references to Whittle Communications’ Channel One, “a controversial 12-minute classroom newscast transmitted free of charge to more than 4 million students in 45 states in exchange for two minutes of daily advertising.”

The PTA and California School Boards Assn. are leading the charge against Channel One. Channel One represents the cutting edge of merchandising in arenas which, until now, have been off limits to advertisers for good and proper reasons. Unlike other “place-based” TV, it represents an assault, not on our personal space but on our kids and at public expense.

Stripped of its pious rhetoric, Whittle Communications is offering a simple barter deal to schools: We provide TV sets and other equipment, you pay for the lease, not with cash, but with a guaranteed number of students for a fixed number of minutes per year.

And that time is as good as gold. It has been reported that Whittle sells each 30-second spot for $150,000.

Channel One represents the first attempt to divert a fixed amount of time, day after day, away from an educational purpose to a commercial one--all this while the mandatory attendance laws are in effect.

A major debate has begun because this scheme offends educators (and parents) ethically and calls into question the very reason our society made a massive investment in public education. If a school sells portions of its day to Nike, Mars candy or Burger King (as it does with Channel One), what is to prevent schools from interrupting classes for other commercials in different formats? Can you imagine the physics teacher being paid to wear a Firestone jacket and being required, by contract, to read a list of tires on sale halfway through class?

Channel One argues that opposition to the program equates with opposition to school-business partnerships. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Whittle Communications’ model is not partnership any more than strip-mining is stewardship of the land. Its own description of Channel One (as distributed to potential advertisers in its “Channel One Summary Brief”) tells the whole story. Channel One’s mission: “Marketing--deliver the single largest reach vehicle against teens 12-17 at a cost-efficient CPM.” (CPM is cost per thousand.)

Advertising is an integral part of America’s free-market economy and nobody objects to it. However, Whittle wants to create a captive model while wrapping it in a free-market cloak. Free-market advertising also brings Americans competing messages. One of Channel One’s inducements (to advertisers) is freedom from competition; if Nike signs up (as it has), your kids will never see a commercial for another running shoe in school.

With the types of advertising you and I are used to, the audience always has the freedom to choose whether to read, listen to or watch an ad. Just as that freedom is key to our system, it is a great source of frustration to advertisers who want access to hard-to-reach audiences. Whittle exploits that frustration by offering a captive audience (guaranteed and subsidized by taxpayers) in our public schools. Under the Channel One model, teachers will be on duty to make sure the audience does not switch stations when the ads for Gatorade or Pepsi appear. That type of compulsion belongs in 1984, not 1991.

Some people will rationalize this deal by saying, “Kids are already used to ads, these aren’t any different than what they get at home.” That is not true. Many of the ads are specifically tailored for the in-school audience, and their impact is intensified simply because they are seen in a classroom setting.

A survey of more than 3,000 students at 51 schools (“Tuning In on Current Events,” Southeastern Educational Improvement Laboratory, March, 1991) reports that “students believed that schools implicitly endorsed the advertisements on video news programs” and tended to believe that the products advertised were good for them.

In the advertising industry, it is axiomatic that the easiest way for a product to win respect is to place it next to something which already commands respect. This is precisely what Channel One schools are, unwittingly, helping advertisers to do. (The schoolhouse is a powerful symbol for the adolescent mind.) In the process, schools are compromising the respect they deserve for being marketplaces of ideas, not marketplaces of sneakers and acne creams.

If Channel One’s main purpose were information, it would be concentrated in classrooms which provided a context for daily news. Because its main purpose seems to be saturation advertising, Whittle’s contract requires all the TV sets in a school to play the Channel One show, regardless of what class is interrupted. Teachers do not have the option to turn off the show.

Happily, there are other options: over-the-air news shows, CNN’s commercial-free “Newsroom,” produced specifically for high school students, or other cable TV shows. The cable industry, through its Cable in the Classroom operation, is offering wiring and programming in a variety of areas to many schools. I favor that model because each teacher is always free to use as much, or as little, of the show as his or her professional judgment dictates.

I believe the bottom line for classroom TV should always be: The teacher uses the medium, the medium should never use the teacher.