Screen shots from the September 4 Channel One News.
The revolving door for Channel One anchors goes around and around.
In May, Cali Carlin told the Channel One audience that she was packing her bags. The other three anchors, Eileen Wu, Alexander Marquardt, and Meka Nichols, all appeared to be staying with the program. However, over the summer all three of them were dumped by Channel One’s new owner Alloy Media and Marketing.
You would think it would be difficult to find anyone – ANYONE – to become an anchor at Channel One after the last year of bad news.
Last December Channel One News was officially named a "discontinued operation" by its previous parent company Primedia. Then three embarrassing months go by as Primedia actively solicits companies,, such as Disney, to buy Channel One or at least invest in it. Company after company looked at Channel One’s controversial TV show and dilapidated equipment and passed. Primedia was within days of shutting down Channel One News for good when a small controversial marketing company called Alloy Media and Marketing offers a humiliating deal to Primedia: Alloy will take over the assets of Channel One and will assume the liabilities of the company and pay Primedia nothing. In effect, Alloy will take Channel One off Primedia’s hands. Primedia tired of Channel One’s drag on its income statement agreed to hand over Channel One News for its scrap value (zero dollars).
Then this summer Channel One’s president and CEO Judy Harris walked away from the company. It appears that Alloy has no intention of naming a replacement.
Yet three people have signed up to be the new face of Channel One News.
They are Tony Anderson, a black man who in the first show (Sept. 4) comes across as trying too hard to be have a hip hop cadence in his talk so as to relate to his much younger audience. Chris Browne appears to be positioning himself as the "Sports Guy" on the show. No school in the country agreed to show Channel One because they would cover sports. If there are sports stories on Channel One News this fall many more schools will pull the plug on the show. The third anchor is Jessica Kumari who may be the only one that has any experience in front of a camera. For a couple of years she was a general assignment reporter for Channel 12 cable network in New York City. This network is a collection of smaller cable channels that serve sections of the city, like the Bronx or Long Island.
It is very obvious that none of these three have a manager or any mentor advising them. They have signed up for passage on a ship that is almost totally submerged. What where they thinking?
The public should remember the names of these three. Their paychecks will come from forcing schoolchildren to view commercials. Only if students sacrifice their precious learning time to watch ads will Anderson, Browne and Kumari get paid. Channel One News generates very little revenue, but what it does make comes disproportionately from schools in lower income areas. These are the young people that can least afford to waste an hour a week watching Anderson, Browne, and Kumari giggle and goof in front of the camera.
These three anchors have a lot to smile about. They are making money the easy way.
They ARE the new faces of student exploitation.
