Does your school still have Channel One News?
Learn how to unplug
Houghton Mifflin/Channel One News
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.
TV network buys children’s “pop quiz” to plug new show
Channel One executives once again make a joke of their “news” show by selling a whole “non-commercial” segment of their program to the Cartoon Network to promote their new TV show called Level Up. Selling their Pop Quiz to advertisers is nothing new for Channel One. This is a deceptive practice because the ad...
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Critics Slam Channel One’s Commercials
By Abby Graham-Pardus TRIBUNE-REVIEW Sunday, August 10, 2003 Susan Linn knows children’s television. She began her career in children’s entertainment, where her work included several appearances with her puppets working on “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” with the late Fred Rogers. ” I’ve always had a really strong interest to use media to promote the health and well-being of children,”...
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Revisiting Time Magazine’s “Captive Audience: Has Advertising in School Gone Too Far?” (2010)
“Channel One News, an in-school TV network launched in 1990 and used in about 8,000 U.S. middle and high schools, has long been a target of criticism because its 12-minute broadcasts include ads. A study published in 2006 in Pediatrics found that on average, students remember more ads from the broadcasts than news stories.”...
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Some Louisiana schools that show movie commercials to students during the school day.
No, they really do. Archbishop Chapelle HS Bourgeois HS Cope MS Downsville HS Eunice JHS Hanson Memorial HS Lutcher HS St. Paul’s School Vidalia JHS Welsh SJ MS Youree Drive MS Zwolle HS
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Some Indiana schools that show movie commercials to students during the school day.
No, they really do. Avon MS North Boston MS Brown Intermediate Center Brownstown Central Middle School Carroll MS Central Noble HS Covington HS Custer Baker Intermediate DeKalb MS Doe Creek MS Driver MS Grimmer MS Jasper MS Justice Intermediate School Kesling MS Kouts MS & HS Maple Ridge Elementary New Prairie MS Noblesville...
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Channel One News Hall of Shame: Stealth TV (2001)
“Channel One’s then-president bragged to a youth marketing conference in 1994, ‘The biggest selling point to advertisers … we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials… . The advertiser gets a group of kids who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background,...
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