Channel One News is a youth marketing company whose main purpose is to get advertising to a captive audience of impressionable schoolchildren. The company loans a school TV equipment in exchange for the school’s contractual pledge to show students a daily, 12-minute, hyper-commercial, TV program called Channel One News. Students lose one hour a week of schools time, which equates to one lost week of instructional time (32 hours) per year. No educational organization endorses the use of Channel One News.
Channel One has fallen on very hard times. Once they claimed over 8 million students were under contract. Since 1997 they have continued to lose schools and now they claim “nearly five million” students and the true figure is probably lower.
In May 2014, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquired Channel One from ZelnickMedia the makers of the ultra-violent Grand Thief Auto video game series. Houghton Mifflin did not disclose the purchase price.
At the end of 2014 most of Channel One’s full-paying advertisers have abandoned the program.
There’s a new movie coming out in October. From the Motion Picture Association of America website: This movie has teen drinking – a LOT of it (we’ve seen the trailer), sexual content, vulgar language, and other offensive content. To give you an idea of this movie: The main male character plays...
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A new advertiser has popped up on Channel One News. (Above) EF Educational Tours of Boston is currently running 30-second commercials on the program. (Below) They also are embedding their ads in the “news” segment. A “pop quiz” is “presented by” the company. The “pop quiz” of course has to tie into EF’s...
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Above are two frames from a 30-second commercial on Channel One News for Samurai Girl. The program is a six-hour TV miniseries. Students were forced to watch this ad during the week before the show began on September 5, 2008. Channel One’s parent company Alloy Media and Marketing created and owns the...
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Sixth grade students forced to watch Channel One News see this shocking public service announcement (PSA) on August 22, 2008. Teachers were not given a warning that this spot was going to be shown. This just came on the classroom TV screen and students as young as ten just had to deal with...
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These are the first words on a public service announcement that is currently playing on Channel One’s MIDDLE SCHOOL broadcast. This is from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, an ad industry group that has produced many exceptional PSAs. Channel One has a long history of airing age-inappropriate PSAs to its younger audience. By...
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Has Steven Lisowski changed his name to "Steven Fabian" so his reputation doesn’t get damaged working for Channel One News? As far as we know this is the first time a budding, wannabe reporter for Channel One has used a stage name. The freshest thing about this first show is the pretty purple logo....
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Earlier this year we wrote about a contest Channel One News ran to help Dreamworks get students excited about a summer movie called Kung Fu Panda. We now have the video of this contest. Actor Jack Black addresses the students directly. He is offering them a role in this movie. (The officials rules only...
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We regret to say that we were premature in saying Channel One News had stopped advertising prescription drugs to children. As you can see, two days after our August 12 article an ad for the prescription drug BenzaClin was back on Channel One’s web site. The ad is on the right of the page...
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From Jim Metrock: Two of last year’s three anchors are not returning to Channel One News. Tony Anderson and Chris Browne didn’t make it one full year. The two new anchors are Steven Lisowski and Justin Finch. They join Jessica Kumari back for her second year. We don’t know if Channel One fired...
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Hooray! Prescription drug ads appear to have been removed from Channel One’s children’s web site. I never received a reply from Dr. Paul Folkemer, Channel One’s VP of Education who is usually very involved in Channel One’s advertising decisions. It must be with great reluctance that the company pulled these ads. These ads for...
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