Classroom News Program Derided by a Pair of Studies

Eight years after its controversial debut, Channel One, the classroom news program beamed into 12,000 schools nationwide, was the object of renewed attack Wednesday from a pair of studies examining the content of the daily 12-minute show.

The program, carried in 175 public and private California schools, is light on news and heavy on advertising and “filler” material, and carries subliminal messages that could be harmful to the 8 million youths who comprise its audience, professors from Vassar College and Johns Hopkins University concluded after studying 36 shows broadcast in 1995 and 1996.

“The news is not the point of Channel One. [It is] no more than filler . . . meant primarily to get us ready for the ads,” Mark Crispin Miller, media studies expert at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a paper entitled “How to Be Stupid: The Teachings of Channel One.”

News made up no more than 58% of the air time in the shows studied, with the remaining 42% filled by ads, a news quiz, promotional activities, music and banter from the Channel One anchors, according to William Hoynes, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins, who conducted his study separately from Miller.

Both studies were coordinated by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group based in New York.

The findings were disputed by Claudia Peters, a Channel One spokeswoman, who said the program has received more than 100 educational and journalism awards, including a Peabody in 1993 for a segment on a young woman with AIDS. Segments have been turned into features for PBS, she added.

“Channel One takes its role in delivering educational and world news and current events programming very seriously, especially since studies show that teenagers are not watching network news or reading newspapers. The fact that Channel One news coverage of Rwanda, Haiti, Chechnya, eating disorders and the perils of drug use is available on PBS stations nationwide speaks for itself,’ Peters said.

Channel One was introduced by Whittle Communications to a pilot group of junior and senior high schools in 1989. Each broadcast carries four 30-second commercials for products such as McDonald’s and Pepsi. Schools that agree to show the program receive free equipment--a satellite dish, a television for every classroom, cable wiring and two VCRs--as well as a daily feed of commercial-free educational programming.

Many education officials derided the effort as exploitation of a captive youth audience. California tried to ban the broadcasts but failed. New York is the only state that prohibits public schools from using Channel One, now owned by K-III Communications and produced in a Los Angeles studio.

Peters said schools using Channel One are satisfied and renew at a rate of 99%. She cited a recent University of Michigan survey of 156 schools in which 93% of teachers using Channel One said they would recommend it.

But Hoynes and Miller suggest that educational benefits are illusory. Hoynes found that only 20% of the air time allotted for news is devoted to coverage of recent “political, economic, social and cultural” stories. The bulk of the news time was spent on weather, sports and disaster stories, he said. Political coverage, Hoynes said, was oversimplified.

He also faulted the coverage for relying heavily on white males--particularly government officials and politicians--as subjects or sources of stories, and said it spent too much time covering Channel One personalities and schools.

“This may be the kind of news that sells advertising time,’ Hoynes wrote. “However, it is dubious whether such news provides educational or civic benefits to either students or educators.”

The studies were welcomed by longtime critics of Channel One, such as Marianne Manilov, director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education in Oakland. Manilov said that over a school year, two minutes of commercials a day add up to one full school day of watching nothing but ads.

At Cerritos’ Gahr High School, one of the pilot schools, Principal Karla Taylor said that some teachers view Channel One as a waste of precious instructional time. But others find it useful for stimulating discussions, she said, and students enjoy it in part because it provides glimpses of life at other schools.

In San Jose, the school board last year agreed that the commercials were harmful and voted to discontinue Channel One at Overfelt High, the first school in the country to agree to screen the program. Former Principal Elias Chamorro said he regrets the board’s decision to end the broadcasts.

“It was a high-quality news program for kids,” he said. “For many, it was the only source of news they got. And the school got equipment [it] badly needed.”

Jeffrey Cole, director of UCLA’s Center for Communication Policy, said he found Channel One programming to be on par with network news and more solid than much of what appears on local stations. He cited Monday’s Channel One show, devoted entirely to President Clinton’s inauguration. One local station, by contrast, did not mention the event until 13 minutes into its broadcast.