From Jim Metrock:
This video clip from the April 25, 2011 Channel One News show would make you sick if you knew the full story.
The Billerica Public School district was one of the first school districts to sign up with Channel One in 1990. The school administrators and teachers immediately received a considerable amount of criticism for wasting an hour a week of school time, watching commercials for Snickers and PG-13 movies, in exchange for the rental use of a TV network.
The educators at Billerica however wanted to keep Channel One, so they came up with a truly bizarre solution to appease irate parents.They would continue to make their students be a captive audience for Channel One’s hyper-commercial program, but they agreed to also teach the students how to better understand the techniques and purposes of commercials. It was every bit as stupid as it sounded.
Billerica teachers and administrators would help children understand how manipulative Channel One’s commercials were, but they would also require the students to watch Channel One’s commercials 90% of all school days as demanded in the contract.
So media literacy expert Renee Hobbs was called upon to teach Billerica teachers how to mitigate the effects of Channel One’s commercials. Many Billerica parents did not understand the true nature of this expert’s involvement with their school district. All the time Ms. Hobbs was teaching media literacy to Billerica teachers she was taking money from Channel One.
In the early 90s Channel One was struggling to get established and the company had to make sure Billerica didn’t drop their program. Ms. Hobbs assured Channel One’s success by using her reputation to smother any protests from parents.It was one of the worse moments for the new media literacy movement in the U.S.
Billerica students were betrayed by their school board, administrators and teachers. Instead of serving the students in their charge, they served the interests of the kiddie marketing firm called Channel One.
This video “Shout Out” from Marshall Middle School shows that Channel One News and its commercials are still a part of a Billerica school day. This Massachusetts school district has been wasting an hour a week of student time since 1990. Where do these students go to to get back their school time?
BTW Isn’t it a little disturbing that government employees (teachers) are compelling their students to do a commercial for a private company? on taxpayer-funded school time? This “Shout Out” is a commercial for Channel One itself. Also, Channel One should have paid these students for appearing in this self-promotion.
Also: https://obligation.org/2011-04-28-watching-billerica-watching-channel-one
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Role of Media Corporations
There has been much debate over the role of media corporations in the media literacy movement. Some scholars believe that media corporations should not be part of the media literacy movement, since their main goal is monetary profit, not an educated audience. Others believe that since media corporations provide access to mass audiences, it is beneficial to have media literacy experts working within these structures as well as outside of them. Some media corporations have created their own media literacy programs and/or offered corporate funding to media educators. Many media literacy experts view this as a conflict of interest.
According to The Free Expression Policy Project: “The conflict over corporate sponsorship also highlights a philosophical rift between those who focus on analysis of media content and those who view the structure of the media industry as an equally important concern.”
Channel One
One example of the controversy involves Channel One, which “had been widely criticized as a cynical and educationally dubious marketing scheme that sold a captive audience of schoolchildren to advertisers” (The Free Expression Policy Project, 2003). The school district of Billerica, Massachusetts took advantage of Channel One’s offer to provide schools with media equipment in exchange for broadcasting 12 minutes of news and two minutes of advertising to students daily. The school district received much criticism for this decision, and in 1992 they hired Renee Hobbs to create a comprehensive program to train teachers to teach media literacy using Channel One. Hobbs later became a paid consultant to Channel One.
In 1999, Channel One was a sponsor of The National Media Education Conference. Due to this sponsorship, several media literacy experts refused to attend. In addition, conference organizers were pressured to create a special meeting to discuss the controversy over Channel One’s sponsorship. The debate over Channel One continued long after the conference. According to The Free Expression Policy Project:
In one post-conference note to a media literacy listserv, Renee Hobbs recounted how she had been “deeply troubled” by Channel One’s presence in classrooms when first approached by the Billerica School District, but eventually found that it provided “regular daily opportunity for a media literacy lesson.” In particular, she said, Channel One’s teen-directed advertising made teachers acutely aware of the need to teach media literacy skills. Hobbs accused “ivory tower” colleagues of demonizing Channel One, which, she pointed out, was now received by 40% of U.S. secondary schools (Renee Hobbs, e-mail communication to [email protected], Dec. 22, 1999). Bob McCannon of the New Mexico Media Literacy Project responded to Hobbs: “You, for better or worse and, undoubtedly, with the sincerest motives, are now a paid part of the PR process” (Bob McCannon, e-mail communication to [email protected], Dec. 22, 1999). McCannon told journalist Manning that “media literacy is being hijacked by corporate interests who are using the movement to buy legitimacy and deflect criticism of their products.” Hobbs responded: “If I gave workshops every day for the rest of my life, I could never reach the eight million children Channel One reaches every day.” (Manning, “Channel One Enters the Media Literacy Movement” as cited in The Free Expression Policy Project)
