Text of the news release sent out on a
Commercial Alert letterhead:
June 11, 2001
Commercial Alert and conservative and progressive
organizations and activists kicked off a campaign today to stop Primedia’s
Channel One from exploiting schoolchildren for commercial gain. Channel
One is a company that uses the schools to advertise to captive audiences
of about eight million children in about 12,000 schools.
The coalition sent letters today to: (1)
all Channel One advertisers, asking them to stop advertising on Channel
One; (2) the top 50 U. S. advertising firms, asking them not to place
ads on Channel One; (3) Members of the U. S. Senate and House appropriations
committees, asking them to prohibit the federal government from paying
for advertising on
Channel One; and, (4) all of Channel One’s "partners," asking
them to sever their ties to Channel One.
Signatories to the letters include Ralph
Nader, Phyllis Schlafly, the United Methodist Church, Focus on the
Family, the American Family Association, Matt Damon, Raffi, and Peggy
O’Mara, the editor and publisher of Mothering magazine, among many
others.
Following is the letter to Mr. Alan G.
Lafley, president and chief executive officer of the Proctor & Gamble
Co.
Dear Mr. Lafley:
We write to ask your company to stop advertising on Primedia’s controversial
in-school marketing program Channel One.
As you know, Channel One shows about ten
minutes of news, banter, music and filler, and two minutes of ads,
to a captive audience of roughly eight million children as young as
eleven years of age, in 12,000 schools each school day.
Compelling impressionable children to view
commercials during their limited school time is repugnant, and removing
Channel One from our nation’s schools is a high-priority education
reform across the conventional political spectrum.
Your company’s advertising revenues are
the lifeblood that keeps Channel One in business. Following are eight
reasons not to advertise on Primedia’s Channel One:
1. Channel One misuses the compulsory attendance
laws to force children to watch ads. Joel Babbit, then-president of
Channel One, explained in 1994 why advertisers like Channel One: "The
biggest selling point to advertisers [is] . . . we are forcing kids
to watch two minutes of commercials." Last year, two Ohio children
were sent to a juvenile detention facility for refusing to watch Channel
One in school.
2. Channel One wastes school time. Each
30-second commercial on Channel One usurps over 66,000 hours of students’
school time across the country. Channel One consumes the equivalent
of one instructional week of students’ school time each school year,
including one full day watching ads.
3. Channel One promotes violent entertainment.
It is irresponsible for Channel One to advertise violent movies, such
as "Supernova," "The Mummy," and James Bond’s "The
World is Not Enough," when millions of parents are rightly worried
about school shootings and violence.
4. Channel One wastes tax dollars spent
on schools. A 1998 study by Max Sawicky and Alex Molnar, titled "The
Hidden Costs of Channel One," concluded that Channel One’s cost
to taxpayers in lost class time is $1.8 billion per year. Every one
of your company’s Channel One ads is a theft of taxpayer money that
should be spent on educating children.
5. Channel One promotes the wrong values
to children. For example, Channel One advertised "Dude, Where’s
My Car?," a movie glorifying two potheads who got so stoned that
they couldn’t remember where they parked
their car. In February, it advertised "Monkeybone," a crass
movie about the battle between a cartoonist and his penis, symbolized
by a monkey. Still worse, Channel One promotes the commercial culture
in general, and teaches a curriculum of materialism, that buying is good,
and will solve your problems, and that consumption and self-gratification
are the goals and ends of life.
6. Channel One is bad for children’s health.
American children are suffering from an epidemic of obesity. Channel
One likely makes this epidemic worse by aggressively promoting junk
food and soda pop. Channel One often advertises Pepsi, despite a recent
study in The Lancet that directly links the consumption of soda pop
to childhood obesity. Given
skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity and Type II diabetes, it is
wrong for schools to teach children to eat high-calorie junk food.
7. Channel One corrupts the integrity of
public education. In effect, Channel One appropriates the authority
of schools and transfers it to the advertisers of these controversial
products. By inviting Channel One’s huckstering into the classroom,
schools implicitly endorse what Channel One advertises, at high cost
to the moral authority of teachers,
administrators and schools.
8. Channel One promotes television instead
of reading. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress
reading test showed that two-thirds of fourth-grade children could
not even read at a proficient level. Children already watch too much
TV, on average, about 19 hours and 40 minutes each week. Schools should
encourage children to read, not to gaze at a TV set.
Channel One claims that it teaches current
events and anti-drug messages effectively. Even if these arguments
were true, there are other ways to teach children such lessons that
do not involve compulsory watching of harmful ads in schools.
Many organizations oppose Channel One or
its use of the schools for commercial advertising. The National Council
of Teachers of English opposes "intrusions of commercial television,
such as Channel One, in the classroom." The National PTA, National
Association of State Boards of Education, Association for Supervision
and Curriculum Development and
other educational organizations oppose commercials in the classroom.
In 1999, the Southern Baptist Convention, our nation’s largest Protestant
denomination, passed a resolution urging parents "to seek effective
ways to protect their children" from Channel One’s "advertising
assault."
In its latest public relations effort,
Primedia’s Channel One professes to be a conservative, pro-family company.
That claim is especially laughable since Primedia has merged with About.com,
which distributes hard-core pornography on the Internet.
Even if you feel your company has the right
to intrude on schoolchildren during their class time, we urge you to
consider the public embarrassment and backlash your company may experience
if you continue to misuse the school day, and continue your company’s
public association with Primedia’s Channel One.
For the sake of our nation’s children,
we strongly recommend that you stop advertising on Primedia’s Channel
One, and issue a public statement encouraging other advertisers to
do the same. We are grateful for your attention to this matter and
look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience. Please
direct your response to Jim Metrock of
Obligation, Inc. at (205) 822-0080 or Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert
at (503) 235-8012.
Sincerely,
Enola Aird,
Director, The Motherhood Project, Institute for American Values
Joan Almon,
Coordinator, Alliance for Childhood
Patricia Aufderheide
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor, American University
David Bollier
FACE=”Arial”>, author, policy strategist
David Bosworth
FACE=”Arial”>, Associate Professor of English, University of Washington
Wally Bowen,
Founder, Citizens for Media Literacy
Michael Brody
FACE=”Arial”>, Chair, Television and Media Committee, American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Brita Butler-Wall
FACE=”Arial”>, Executive Director, Citizens’ Campaign for Commercial-Free
Schools
Bettye M. Caldwell
FACE=”Arial”>, Past President, National Association for the Education of
Young Children
Nancy Carlsson-Paige
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Education, Lesley University
Jason Catlett
FACE=”Arial”>, President, Junkbusters Corp.
Ronnie Cummins
FACE=”Arial”>, National Director, Organic Consumers Association
Matt Damon,
actor
Gloria DeGaetano
FACE=”Arial”>, CEO, The Parent Coaching Institute; author of Television
and the Lives of Our Children and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill
Leon Eisenberg
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry
Emeritus, Harvard Medical School
David Elkind
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Child Development, Tufts University; author,
The Hurried Child
Amitai Etzioni
FACE=”Arial”>, University Professor, George Washington University; author,
Next: The Road to the Good Society
Michael Feinstein
FACE=”Arial”>, Mayor, City of Santa Monica, California
Roy F. Fox,
Assoc. Prof. of Literacy Education, U. of MO-Columbia; author, Harvesting
Minds and MediaSpeak
Gilbert L. Fuld
FACE=”Arial”>, former Member, Board of Directors, American Academy of Pediatrics
John Taylor Gatto
FACE=”Arial”>, author, The Underground History of American Education and
Dumbing Us Down
George Gerbner
FACE=”Arial”>, President and Founder, Cultural Environment Movement; Dean
Emeritus, Annenberg School of Communication
Rev. Tom Grey
FACE=”Arial”>, Executive Director, National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion
Lt. Col. David Grossman
SIZE=”-1″ FACE=”Arial”>, former Professor of Psychology, West Point; author,
On Killing and Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill
Jaydee Hanson
FACE=”Arial”>, Assistant General Secretary for Public Witness and Advocacy,
General Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Church
Jane M. Healy
FACE=”Arial”>, author, Failure to Connect and Endangered Minds
Mark Hickson
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor and Chair of the Department of Communications Studies,
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Carol Holst,
Program Director, Seeds of Simplicity
Michael F. Jacobson
FACE=”Arial”>, Executive Director of the Center for Science in the Public
Interest; co-author, Marketing Madness
Sut Jhally,
Founder and Executive Director, The Media Education Foundation
Carden Johnston
FACE=”Arial”>, Chair, Task Force on Commercialism in the Classroom, Alabama
Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics
Jean Kilbourne
FACE=”Arial”>, author, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way
We Think and Feel
Rebecca T. Kirkland
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Pediatrics, Chief of Academic General Pediatrics,
Baylor College of Medicine
Naomi Klein,
author, No Logo
David C. Korten
FACE=”Arial”>, author, When Corporations Rule the World
Velma LaPoint
FACE=”Arial”>, Associate Professor of Human Development, Howard University
Diane Levin,
Professor of Education, Wheelock College; author, Remote Control Childhood
Jane Levine,
Founder, Kids Can Make A Difference
Susan Linn,
Associate Director, Media Center of the Judge Baker Children’s Center;
Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Dana Mack,
Senior Fellow, Center for Education Studies: author, The Assault on Parenthood
Bob McCannon
FACE=”Arial”>, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project
Robert McChesney
FACE=”Arial”>, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;
author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Ken McNatt,
President, Students Against Commercialized Classrooms Organization (SACCO)
Robert A. Mendelson
FACE=”Arial”>, Clinical Professor, Oregon Health Sciences University
Michael Mendizza
FACE=”Arial”>, Co-founder, Touch The Future
Jim Metrock,
President, Obligation, Inc.
Mark Crispin Miller
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University
Tom Minnery,
Vice President of Public Policy, Focus on the Family
Alex Molnar,
Professor of Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Director,
Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education
Kathryn C. Montgomery
FACE=”Arial”>, President, Center for Media Education
Diane Morrison
FACE=”Arial”>, Research Professor, School of Social Work, University of
Washington
Ralph Nader
Mary O’Brien, author, Making Better
Environmental Decisions
Peggy O’Mara
FACE=”Arial”>, Editor and Publisher of Mothering Magazine
Gary Palmer,
President, Alabama Policy Institute
Shelley Pasnik
FACE=”Arial”>, children’s media writer and researcher
Neil Postman
FACE=”Arial”>, Chairman, Department of Culture and Communication, New York
University; author, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Alvin F. Poussaint
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Raffi,
the children’s troubadour, Founder and Chair, Troubadour Institute for
Child-Honoring
Hugh Rank,
Professor Emeritus, Governors State University; author, Persuasion Analysis
Lee Richardson
FACE=”Arial”>, former President, Consumer Federation of America
Gary Ruskin,
Executive Director, Commercial Alert
Phyllis Schlafly
FACE=”Arial”>, President, Eagle Forum
Don Shifrin,
past President, Washington Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics
Tamara L. Sobel
FACE=”Arial”>, Project Director, The Girls, Women and Media Project
John Stauber
FACE=”Arial”>, founder, PR Watch; co-author, Trust Us, We’re Experts and
Toxic Sludge is Good for You
Inger Stole,
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Advertising, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Victor Strasburger
FACE=”Arial”>, Professor of Pediatrics, University of New Mexico School
of Medicine
Sue Lockwood Summers
FACE=”Arial”>, Director, Media Alert!
Frank Vespe,
Executive Director, TV-Free America
Linda Wagener
FACE=”Arial”>, Associate Dean, School of Psychology, Fuller Theological
Seminary
David Walsh,
President, National Institute on Media and the Family; author, Selling
Out America’s Children
Donald E. Wildmon
FACE=”Arial”>, President, American Family Association, Inc.
Nancy Willard
FACE=”Arial”>, Project Director, Responsible Netizen, Center for Advanced
Technology in Education, University of Oregon |
Even some people in Hollywood don’t like Channel One.
