April 9th, 2000
MUST-SEE TV; Channel One is Now Required Viewing in Many Schools
By Mark Francis Cohen
Washington Post
The Rev. Peter Weigand is a priest with fluffy gray hair and thickish eyeglasses who uses his dark and sweeping Benedictine monk’s robe to great effect. On a woefully cold morning in February, he glides through the carpeted corridors of St. Anselm’s Abbey School in Northeast Washington, where he is the headmaster, in a manner not unlike a comic-book superhero. His robe cascades behind him, and the sight of him has blazer-wearing boys falling over themselves to get into their classrooms on time. “Come on. Homeroom is about to begin,” he says gently, shooing the air with his hands.
Father Peter—as he is called—is a model administrator. All 31 seniors at his school have been accepted to college. He was recently named D.C. principal of the year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals for his stewardship of St. Anselm’s, which is run by the Benedictine Order.
Father Peter is also in the forefront of one of the more debated issues of the education world: He is a strong and visible defender of Channel One, the private television network that has brought television, and slick TV advertising, into millions of classrooms. Last year, he heaped praise on the company at congressional hearings and in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. The network couldn’t have asked for a better advocate. What’s more, St. Anselm’s was the first school in the District to air Channel One when the network began 10 years ago.
At that time, Channel One was something of a public scourge, and it fomented a coast-to-coast uprising. The very notion of hanging a TV set in a classroom and prodding students to watch it—and the commercials that support it—inspired a whole lot of bile. Critics saw it as child exploitation and television mania run amok. New York and California banned the network, and almost every major educational group, including the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, denounced it.
But eventually, Channel One won the ground war and proliferated swiftly for one simple reason: It promised to install, for free, televisions and a videocassette recorder in each school that would agree to have its students watch the Channel One broadcast. This offer was especially enticing to school administrators, like Father Peter, who wanted to bring modern technology to their kids but lacked the funds to do so. The network’s only requirement was that principals sign contracts ensuring that their students would watch the network’s daily 12-minute newscast. For Channel One, this was key because the morning newscast was laden with two minutes of expensive commercials—by soda makers, candy companies and acne-medicine manufacturers—and it was through these commercials that the company hoped to turn a profit.
Today, by such contracts, Channel One has acquired an audience of 8.1 million teenagers and has earned millions of dollars in advertising revenue. In the District, all of the public junior and senior high schools feature Channel One, as do 40 private schools in the region, though it has been rejected repeatedly by most public school boards in the Washington suburbs. Nationally, according to the company’s estimates, the program is now shown in 12,000 schools. That is to say, on any given day more than 40 percent of high school students are watching Channel One and its commercials. Put another way, the network has far more viewers than WB’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Channel One’s clientele—educators—couldn’t be more loyal to the network, at least on paper. Ninety-nine percent of the schools with Channel One intend to show it again next year. While Father Peter, for one, isn’t effusive about the network, he thinks it is valuable. “Kids don’t read newspapers anymore,” he says. “There are pros and cons. But I think the good outweighs the bad. There are some things I don’t like. Some of the things they show are risque. But you can’t censor children in this day and age.”
Ratings, profit, free equipment, a decent news program and a so-what attitude on the part of the educational community, all these things help explain why Channel One is approaching permanence in classrooms. And while it is hard to champion Channel One unequivocally, it’s equally hard to condemn it as absolute pollution. For one thing, Channel One has invested in and improved its newscast, making it strong enough that the commercials aren’t as obnoxious. Also, the network is free to schools (although it does cost at least 12 minutes of student time a day).
While there are still people actively challenging Channel One—the network last year hired Washington lobbyists to protect its flanks on Capitol Hill—its original foes have come to accept the network as part of the scenery. “We opposed Channel One from the beginning,” says Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, “but we aren’t waging an active battle. It’s not as much on the radar screen as when it first started . . . It’s not a major issue with our people.”
Yet as much as its critics have adjusted to the idea of commercial TV in the classroom, the notion of school-sanctioned TV advertising directed at a captive audience of millions of students remains a real issue. The network’s executives insist that the show should be evaluated the same as any other news program that relies on ads to pay its bills would be. But there is a difference between Channel One and regular old TV news. The consumers in this setting—students—cannot change the channel or turn off the set.
“A lot of corporations view children as economic resources to be exploited,” says Gary Ruskin, the director of Commercial Alert, a D.C.-based advocacy group opposed to Channel One. “It’s repugnant to sell our kids to advertisers while we compel them to be at school.”
At 8 a.m., in teacher Ted Findler’s homeroom class at St. Anselm’s, Channel One comes to life. A 19-inch Magnavox that’s hanging at the front of the room goes on. One of the show’s anchors, Monica Novotny, a hungry-looking journalist with chestnut-colored hair, appears. She provides some news headlines, but she doesn’t draw much of the boys’ attention. In fact, of these 15 seventh-graders, only three seem to really watch it. Several glance up at it occasionally, in between cracking jokes with friends. Some don’t bother to look at the screen at all.
This all changes in a moment’s notice when a commercial comes on, and one student, a small boy with dark hair and glasses, fires off a commanding “Look!” Everyone—including Findler—turns to the television.
What they see is an advertisement for Finish Line, a running shoe store. A husky man has just finished a race and is breathing desperately in the middle of an athletic field. Soon, two young guys from Finish Line rush him yelling “great race.” The runner, looking mortified, tries to get away from them but one of the guys jumps into the runner’s arms and wraps his leg around the runner’s waist. At that, the room peals with laughter and the words on the screen read: “Maybe we love runners too much.”
Then the news programming resumes, the second part of a series produced by MTV News on the increasing use of crystal meth, an illegal drug, among teenagers. And finally there’s the Channel One pop quiz. The televised multiple-choice test captures a cluster of boys’ attention. A few shout out possible answers.
After the show, I quiz the boys on what they think of Channel One. They answer in unison. Do you watch it? “Yes.” Do you learn from it? “Yes.” Would you miss it? “Yes.” What do you like the best? “The commercials!” The commercials? “They’re funny,” one student says. “I love the Pepsi commercials!” says another.
CJ Fraleigh, vice president of marketing for Pepsi, knows Channel One students love his commercials. “Channel One is an efficient way to reach teens,” he says. “Wait, let me rephrase that. Channel One is the most efficient way to reach teens.” Pepsi was one of the first advertisers to put commercials on the network. Today, it runs about two spots a week. “The likelihood that a student is going to pay attention to a Channel One broadcast is far greater than any other program,” Fraleigh says. “We know they’re not getting up to go to the refrigerator and they’re not flipping to MTV.”
Television commercials are crafted to invade our imagination quickly and profoundly. Advertisers know that people start a conversation, do a chore or walk away from the TV once the program they have been watching takes a commercial break, so advertisers design their products to grab attention swiftly. Channel One commercials are no different. They use the same traditional methods to ensnare viewers—songs, humor, imagery. They have very few of the same obstacles. In fact, by and large, they are not tailored for Channel One but are the exact commercials cut for the competitive wilds of network television. Thus, even if students hardly pay attention to Channel One, as was the case in Findler’s homeroom class, they tend to absorb fully the commercials—just as they would at home.
Channel One’s executives are quite aware of their unmatched position in the marketplace. In ads they have run in publications like Advertising Age, they pitch potential sponsors this way: “We have the undivided attention of millions of teenagers for 12 minutes a day—that might be a world record.”
Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, did a study in 1997 of Channel One’s commercials, and concluded that they were affecting students’ consumer behavior. The study—paid for by the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, which is clearly anti-Channel One—also concluded that because the products were being peddled in the classroom, they were seen by students as having the endorsement of the teachers and schools.
Which is a long way for schools to have come in the 10 years since Channel One first hit the scene.
Before Channel One was conceived, schools were considered sacrosanct. It was unimaginable that educators would stand behind a profitable television company that hawked candy bars and high-priced sneakers to students in the classroom. At that time, corporations and schools did not enter into commercial agreements. Taco Bell wasn’t sold in cafeterias. Coca-Cola didn’t sponsor school events. Dell wasn’t donating “Donated by Dell” computers.
Then Christopher Whittle conjured up the idea of Channel One. A handsome, ambitious entrepreneur with the persuasive skills of an uber-salesman and the rampant ego of a child actor, Whittle had made a small fortune presiding over a burgeoning empire of specialty magazines, Whittle Communications.
In 1987 he convened a focus group at a Holiday Inn in Knoxville, Tenn., to discuss one of the company’s educational publications with teachers. One of them casually offered that she’d like to see a “Today” show for teenagers in the classroom. Whittle immediately seized on the idea (adding the vital advertising component) and sold the heck out of it. In the most crucial of his coups, he persuaded Time Inc. to put up $ 185 million toward the project.
Within two years everything about Channel One fell into place—the technology, the advertisers, the news program and thousands of the nation’s equipment-hungry schools. Whittle did all this despite the major furor over advertising in the classroom that ensued and led California and New York to ban commercial television from schools.
By 1992, Whittle Communications was earning $ 200 million in revenue, of which more than half was being generated by Channel One. By 1994, the percentage of high schools carrying Channel One hit 40 percent—the same as it is today. Whittle’s company, though, ultimately imploded because of bloat, tax questions and management problems. In 1994 a financially bereft Whittle sold Channel One to Primedia (then known as K-III), for $ 240 million.
Channel One’s new owner, which also publishes New York and Seventeen magazines, cut costs and revamped the company, moving its headquarters and sales force from the grandiose headquarters Whittle built in Knoxville to New York. Channel One has been profitable for Primedia. Advertisers, from Snickers to Gatorade to Reebok, love it, gladly paying about $ 200,000 for a 30-second spot, the same amount charged by network television. Last year, Primedia, according to its annual report, earned $ 346 million in revenue from advertising on Channel One and its companion Web site, Channel One Interactive.
Primedia also hired, for the first time, an academic to focus on the educational aspects of the newscast. “To teach kids the news,” as that man, Paul Folkemer, puts it. Even before he was put on the payroll in 1998, Folkemer, an award-winning principal of Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J., was one of the show’s key advocates. Channel One regularly directed reporters to his school, and they usually walked away impressed. Students at Franklin watched, learned and responded to the show—primarily because teachers built curriculum, including analysis of commercial advertising, around the broadcast.
By many accounts, Folkemer has increased the level of the educational content on Channel One. But that doesn’t mean he and Channel One don’t have their detractors. Jim Metrock of Birmingham, Ala., is a vocal Channel One dissident who runs a children’s advocacy organization called Obligation Inc. At rallies, Metrock likes to tell parents that Folkemer, who approves all advertising on Channel One, “is one of the most influential people in your children’s lives.” And he definitely doesn’t mean that in a good way.
Paul Folkemer has a sunny Mister Rogers air about him. On the sixth floor of Channel One’s fashionable headquarters on Madison Avenue, he sports corduroys, button-down shirt, buttery silk tie and owlish glasses. If Chris Whittle came to embody a hard-selling, brush-past-the-critics Channel One, Folkemer symbolizes a new approach—pleasant, assured and eager to get along.
Channel One’s lobby buzzes with television screens showing the network’s multiethnic reporters. Folkemer’s office is sleek, harmonious and bright. The place could be a department-store floor model for feng shui design: the blond-wood desk and the computer and the round conference table that’s circled by four chairs.
After a brief conference call with Channel One’s producers and reporters that is loaded with cheers and applause because one of the crews has just landed an interview with John McCain, Folkemer turns to a lingering question: whether schools should allow commercial TV in their classrooms.
Jeff Ballabon, a public relations executive at Channel One, is in the room, too. “Our model is no different than any news organization!” Ballabon says, visibly annoyed. “We use advertising to pay for the program, and it’s an expensive program to create. If we didn’t care about the program, why would we spend all that money?”
Ballabon says that Channel One is about to spend even more to replace the 19-inch televisions it has provided to schools, which in some cases are 10 years old, with 27-inch ones. At the same time, though, Channel One is not adding new schools to the program because it’s too expensive. Given that school-age population is growing, Channel One viewership will increase anyway, despite the freeze.
And it is those numbers that Folkemer showcases when defending the value of Channel One. “There are 12,000 schools showing Channel One. Four hundred thousand teachers watch it with 8 million kids. Are all these teachers dumb?” he says. “Have they been fooled by Channel One for 10 years?”
But what about the quality of the broadcast prepared by Channel One? How good is it? One place to begin answering that question is with Anderson Cooper, who worked for Channel One until he was hired in 1995 by ABC News as the broadcast network’s youngest correspondent. Today, he anchors “World News Now” and reports for “20/20.” (Last year, Lisa Ling, a former Channel One colleague of his, was also hired by ABC to co-anchor “The View,” a morning talk program.)
“There is no place like Channel One,” Cooper says. “I could say, I want to go to Iran, and they’d send me to Iran.” Cooper traveled extensively for the network, hopping from Rwanda to Haiti to Bosnia. His reporting was typical of Channel One’s heavily first-person approach. He’d air stories about running out of gas in the muds of Africa, experiencing missile fire from his hotel room and approaching a heap of dead bodies—a despairing scene that he punctuated by displaying footage of himself vomiting.
“It was the commercials that paid for me to go to Rwanda,” he says. “And because it was seen in schools and it had a guaranteed audience, it had this great PBS quality. As long as you could make the story interesting, you could go anywhere.”
Channel One still sends its eight reporters, some of whom are as young as 18, all over the world, and it still airs a couple of PBS-style stories a day, rather than breezing through a list of the day’s current events. To keep their stories appealing, the correspondents wear trendy clothes and often include the voices of teenagers. And some have been deemed good enough for broadcast television. Recently, the “CBS Early Show” brokered an agreement with Channel One to air one of its stories as a “Study Hall” segment every other Thursday.
Researchers have found that students who pay attention to the Channel One broadcast learn a fair amount about current events. A University of Michigan study showed a 6 to 8 percent increase in current events knowledge among students who watched Channel One consistently. Meanwhile, the news program has won many awards over the years, including a Peabody for a story on AIDS. And schools usually renew their contracts, suggesting a certain satisfaction with the service. According to Channel One, it has a 1 percent attrition rate.
Lending more credibility to the notion that teenagers enjoy the broadcast is how the correspondents are treated by the viewers. Monica Novotny, the 24-year-old Channel One anchor, says she has often been thronged by adoring fans. “My first encounter with it was when we were doing a piece on a marching band,” she says. “We were at this high school stadium and about half of it was filled . . . All of a sudden, they started cheering ‘Monica’ and ‘Channel One.’ That was cool.”
Still, statistics and chanting fans don’t always tell the whole story. On a brisk, blue-sky morning, the grassy grounds in front of Eastern High School, a neo-Gothic building in Northeast Washington, are still emerging from the winter doldrums. Inside, 18 sophomores in Frances Simms’s homeroom are about to show a visitor how they watch Channel One.
“Quiet, quiet, quiet,” she says as the students settle in. Simms, a 29-year teaching veteran whose glasses and navy jacket seem to affirm her years on the job, is holding a yardstick. She reaches up with it to turn on the television at the front of the room. Looking for the right channel, she pokes a button with the yardstick many times, swiftly flipping past other programs. “Leave it there!” a girl with a purple Looney Toons backpack crows as Simms switches past one of the judge shows. Finally Simms locates the right station, whereupon Monica Novotny appears. Novotny gazes into the camera as she breaks the news that pro football player Derrick Thomas died yesterday. Footage of twisted metal moves across the screen.
“Was it a plane?” It is the Looney Toons girl again; she’s one of the few watching the program. “No, he died in a car crash,” a boy near her responds.
It’s hard to hear the program because most of the students are talking and the loudspeaker occasionally crackles with a school announcement. One girl retreats into a game of solitaire on the computer. Simms, well aware that the students aren’t giving Channel One much attention, explains to me with a chuckle: “What do you do? They’re a bunch of worms and caterpillars.” But then she hollers at the class: “BE QUIET AND WATCH THE SHOW!”
All eyes are now fixed on the set and all mouths are shut—until a Doritos commercial flickers on. Some start talking again. “Can you close your mouth?” Simms says. “It’s a commercial!” a student whines.
A little while later, after viewing the balance of the show—which is dominated by the MTV News segment on the increasing use of crystal meth among teenagers—they start talking about Channel One. “The information about drugs and what it does to you was good,” Simms says. Then Christina Battle, a 15-year-old with a long ponytail, says matter-of-factly, “This was our first time watching it.” Another agrees: “This is my first time.” Suddenly it becomes a refrain, as more students repeat this line, so I ask Simms how often Eastern is tuned into Channel One. She acknowledges that it is rarely.
But, she says, sounding almost regretful, “If they watched it, it would be good. A lot of these kids don’t have access to newspapers, and they don’t have time to read them anyway. They have to work jobs at night or take care of kids. It was informative.”