Students Need More Than Zing From Channel One

In one sense, there was some surprising news the other day about Channel One, the made-for-the-classroom news program that has been banned in California’s public schools because it laces its learning with commercials.

Whittle Communications, the owner of Channel One, actually paid for a study concluding that its own product hasn’t done much to increase high school students’ knowledge of current affairs.

(Not a surprise: No research was done on the effect of the commercials on this captive audience because Whittle refused to pay for that .)

Now here’s the meat of the study, the old news that lots of people have been chewing over for years. When it comes to journalism, experts have found that coverage of Important Issues tends to bore the American public at large, and teen-agers more than most.

These same experts have been advising journalists to fix this, for the good of democracy and for the good of their own jobs. The idea here is to give the news some zing. Symposiums surface about this all the time; lots of brightly colored graphics are usually involved.

The old, gray DBIs (Dull But Important stories) naturally don’t fit this mix. The trick is to charm, or con, the public into digesting its castor oil. This makes the media feel better about themselves.

This too is apparently what Channel One, which is used in more than 10,000 schools, set out to do. So confident was it of the success of its mission, that Whittle commissioned its study--conducted from September, 1990, to May of last year--to document the results.

From its inception, Channel One has been marketed as an effective weapon against teen-agers’ notorious “I couldn’t care less” attitude about current events. Except, so far at least, it appears that apathy has won.

Researchers found that most of the kids with Channel One in their classrooms tuned in and out of the heavy stuff, say, turmoil in the Soviet republics or South Africa, while paying closer attention to the softer fare, such as segments about film, music or finding a summer job.

And the kids, while perhaps a little weak on the Croats and the Serbs, definitely remembered the commercials, which account for two minutes of the total 12-minute Channel One show. (This is why, aside from California, New York and Rhode Island have also banned Channel One).

The study, which is the first phase of a three-year research project, concluded that Channel One and other television news programs are usually too fast-paced and fragmented to deepen students’ understanding of current events. The diagnosis, in other words: too much zing.

This can be a seductive and dangerous thing.

The study found it was easy for teachers to just turn on the tube and expect the electron beams to register in the appropriate recesses of their students’ brains. This is apparently what too many of them did.

Which, mea culpa , we all do now and again.

We turn on “Sesame Street” before our children are old enough to walk and then we walk out of the room. It’s “educational,” after all; we turn it on and we feel rather smug. We feel we are doing right by our child and, so convenient for us, it’s as easy as popping some macaroni in the microwave for lunch.

But shortcuts can have a cumulative effect. They shortchange us as well.

The study found that Channel One made its greatest impact when teachers incorporated the news program’s topics into their lesson, when they used the tube as a prop to enhance what they were teaching face to face.

This is the old-fashioned way, only new and improved. The zing gets their attention. The teacher explains why they should care. And this, really, is the important question here.

Why should teen-agers care about current affairs? Their world is their friends, their school, who they are dating, the movies they’re seeing, the songs that are blasting from the Walkman or the radio in the car.

They glimpse a news clip on the nightly news--”ABC News. Where More Americans Get There News Than Any Other Source”--and they can’t relate. It is not them.

This is the way that most American teen-agers have lived for a while. Back in my day, I lived it too. I didn’t read the newspaper, my parents did. They seemed to like dull.

I have since come around, finding the zing in the news itself. And I get paid for it, too.

Problem is, millions of other Americans have not moved on; they’ve become hooked on the fluff. More people are reading less. Television news has come to specialize in zing, otherwise, it is rationalized, the public won’t tolerate the serious stuff.

It’s a problem, for democracy and the media as well. The Channel One experience should be a lesson in itself. There is a place for flash. It’s an attention-grabbing tool. But use it the old-fashioned way, as an opener to explain why we should care about the rest of the world.