NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (202) 387-8030
For Immediate Release: March 14th, 2005
Channel One Stumbles Due to Financial Woes, Old TVs and Opposition
Advertising Age reported today that Channel One has run into a multitude of troubles: “Its equipment is badly in need of an upgrade, advertisers are fleeing, critics are declaring they want to put it out of business, and the top executive, one of the founders, is leaving.”
Channel One is a company that uses the schools to advertise to captive audiences of about eight million children in about 12,000 schools across the country. It was founded by Chris Whittle in 1990, and is currently owned by Primedia, Inc.
“Channel One’s repugnant business model of forcing children to watch ads in school is failing.” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization that opposes the commercialization of education. “This is just the latest instance of the rejection of the commercial culture and its spread into the schools.”
“Parents are fed up with corporations interfering with their relationship with their own children,” Ruskin said. “Across the country, people are finally coming to realize that pushing advertising at schoolchildren is intolerable, outrageous and wrong.” Some examples are the disintegration of the ZapMe! Corp, the defeat of Time-Warner’s plans to put ads on CNN Student News, and the removal of soda pop or other junk food marketers in California, Texas, Maine, Arkansas, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle, among other places.
Americans are increasingly turning against the commercial culture. Overwhelming majorities of Americans are sick of advertisers efforts to dangle an ad in front of us at every waking moment. According to a Yankelovich Partners poll last year, 60% of Americans have a “much more negative opinion of marketing and advertising now than a few years ago,” 61% of Americans “feel the amount of marketing and advertising is out of control,” 65% feel “constantly bombarded with too much advertising and marketing, ”and 65% “think there should be more limits and regulations on marketing and advertising.” (To read the poll, go to http://www.commercialalert.org/Yankelovich.pdf.)
Commercial Alert is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy. For more information, see our website at: http://www.commercialalert.org.
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