Every week, Channel One
News plays a joke on the school boards that signed up for their service.
They run a feature called The Play of the Week. This is a promotional
effort by Channel One to get more students to watch their program.
Virtually every day near the beginning of the show, Channel One
encourages students to send in video tapes of an athletic endeavor.
The point
is for students to nag their teachers to turn on Channel One because
this week their video may be played on the show.
When you watch this clip, notice the actual "play" of
the week. It is absolutely silly. A football player bobbles a football
and finally catches it. Go to any high school game and you see
fifty
more impressive plays than that before the first half. Channel
One doesn’t care if the play is routine or spectacular. They don’t
get
that many videos sent in so Channel One can’t be picky.
Everything about Channel One News is "lite". Their news
is "lite",
there journalistic ethics are "lite" and even their
Plays of the Week are "lite".
No school or school board ever gave Channel One permission to
show clips of high school and middle school sporting events.
(What does
this have to do with current events??) Indeed, this is an insult
to school boards that agreed to have Channel One come into
their classrooms.
The deal was schools would sacrifice an hour a week of school
time for a current events-news show. Channel One News has been
steadily
moving away from current events for the last several years.
The video below is just one example of this trend.
This whole segment is a commercial for Gatorade. It is not
the "Channel
One Play of the Week" it is the "Gatorade Play
of the Week." This
is in ADDITION to the two minutes of formal advertisements.
This violates the contract with schools. Anyone who is familiar
with Channel One
News knows that they have increased, sometimes substantially,
the amount of commercial content. "Two minutes" is
now the MINIMUM of commercial time and not the maximum as
promised to schools.
Notice also that Errol Barnett takes up valuable school time
showing off a shirt that a student sent him. This is yet
another way that
Channel One lures students to watch. You never know when
the anchor will be
wearing your school’s shirt or hat.
Seth Doane then takes time to tell students to go to ChannelOne.com.
Again, no school gave permission for Channel One to promote
their entertainment web site. (If you think this is primarily
a news
web site, just take
a look around channelone.com.)
After the anchors finally sign off the show continues
by flashing a school name. This is part of a contest
that
has nothing to
do with news. It is an effort by Channel One to confirm
their audience
numbers
to their national advertisers. If they can tease teachers
with some money, they will get more of them to watch.
If they can
show advertisers
a good number of schools entering this contest, then
they can justify their ad rates.
The final thing you see in this clip is the rules for
the Gatorade contest. It scrolls up the screen in extremely
small print
that is unreadable even if you were 6 inches away from
the screen.
This is
a joke played on the kids. Channel One executives are
basically
saying, "Who
cares if you know the rules, kid. We have a legal responsibility
to show you the rules but it doesn’t mean that they
have to be readable."
When you watch this clip understand that right before
this clip starts there were two 30-second commercials,
so add
one minute
of waste
to the time of this clip. Look at your watch and
start the clip. However
long it is (we could tell you but that would spoil
the fun), multiply that time (plus the minute, remember)
by the number
of students
in your school. Or multiply by 8 million students
nationwide. Both figures
should make you sick. And that is just the wasted
time at the END on just ONE show.
Obligation’s Jim Metrock said, "I challenge any pro-Channel
One teacher to stand up before their community and defend the various
things
we see in this clip. This shows how Channel One
has broken their contractual promises to schools. It also shows how
they are stealing time (time=money)
from taxpayers. When you promise to deliver ten
minutes of daily news and you don’t come close to honoring that promise,
then people have
a right to want your product out of their schools."
