Main Issues With Channel One

Channel One has received major critcism from parents, educators, and policy makers. Listed below are the main issues with this program:

1. Channel One uses the compulsory attendance laws to force children to watch ads. 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.” 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 recently reported 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.