NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin and Jim Metrock (202) 387-8030
For Immediate Release: September 29th, 2000
Brownback Carries Water for Company That Promotes Violent Entertainment to Schoolchildren
Conservative and progressive organizations and scholars today criticized Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) for his work as “chief Senate apologist” for Primedia’s Channel One, an “anti-family corporation that exploits children for commercial gain” by compelling them to watch advertising in schools, including ads for violent entertainment.
The letter states that “Many parents detest Channel One because it directly undercuts their authority. Essentially, Channel One is a vehicle for advertisers to promote in schools what many parents wouldn’t allow into their homes.” The letter follows.
Dear Senator Brownback:
We are disappointed that you have become the chief Senate apologist for Primedia’s Channel One, a marketing company that uses the schools to bypass parental authority and promotes violent entertainment to school children.
As you know, Primedia’s Channel One, under the guise of a news show, delivers two minutes of advertising each schoolday to a captive audience of approximately eight million children in 12,000 schools. Joel Babbit, then-president of Channel One, explained in 1994 why advertisers like Channel One: “The biggest selling point to advertisers [is] . . . we are forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials.
Many parents detest Channel One because it directly undercuts their authority. Essentially, Channel One is a vehicle for advertisers to promote in schools what many parents wouldn’t allow into their homes. For example, in recent months, Channel One has advertised violent movies such as “Supernova,” “The Mummy,” and James Bond “The World is Not Enough.”
You have spoken in public on behalf of parents against the promotion of violent entertainment to children. We expected that you would seek to support the authority of parents in this matter as well. Instead, we find you working on the side of those who wish to bypass parents and promote violent entertainment to vulnerable schoolchildren.
The opposition to Channel One is large and growing. For example, in June, 1999, the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, passed a resolution urging community leaders to remove Channel One from the schools.
Channel One is a big step in the wrong direction for children, schools and taxpayers.
1. Channel One uses the compulsory attendance laws to force children to watch ads.
2. Channel One wastes precious school time. Channel One consumes the equivalent of one instructional week of school time each school year, including one full day watching ads.
3. Channel One helps advertisers bypass parents to promote products which parents may not approve of, such as exorbitantly expensive athletic sneakers and violent movies.
4. Channel One wastes tax dollars spent on schools. A 1998 study by Max Sawicky and Alex Molnar, titled “The Hidden Costs of Channel One,” concluded that Channel One’s cost to taxpayers in lost class time is $1.8 billion per year.
5. Channel One may harm children’s health. Channel One advertises Snickers, Twix, M&M’s, Pepsi and other junk food to children in classrooms. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that “Obesity is epidemic in the United States.” Obesity is a major public health problem. Given skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity and diabetes, it is insanity for schools to encourage children to develop poor eating habits.
6. Channel One—not parents or school boards—decides its ads and program content. Channel One violates the principle of local control of education. Parents should be able to choose who may affect their children’s lives, not Channel One.
7. Channel One undermines parents’ efforts to teach positive values to their children. Channel One teaches a curriculum of materialism, that buying is good, and will solve your problems, and that consumption and self-gratification are the goals and ends of life.
8. Channel One corrupts the integrity of public education and diminishes the moral authority of schools and teachers. In effect, Channel One appropriates the authority of schools and teachers and transfers it to advertisers for these controversial products. Schools implicitly endorse the products that Channel One advertises.
You defend Channel One because it delivers anti-drug messages to children. Even if such messages were effective, there are other ways to deliver anti-drug messages that do not undermine parental authority the way Channel One does. Channel One’s blatant commercializing of the schools outweighs—and perhaps even undercuts—any merit that its anti-drug messages might otherwise have.
Parents need your help, Senator. We need you to help parents control the influences on their own children. Please reconsider your position on Channel One, and fight for parents and children—not an anti-family corporation that exploits children for commercial gain.
Sincerely,
Bob McCannon, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project
Robert McChesney, Research Associate Professor, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Jim Metrock, President, Obligation Inc.
Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University
Gary Ruskin, Director, Commercial Alert
Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum
Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, President, American Family Association
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Commercial Alert opposes corporate exploitation of children and the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. Commercial Alert’s web page on Channel One is at http://www.commercialalert.org/channel_one/index.html and its website is at http://www.commercialalert.org/.
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