Hype And Fluff Make Channel One Bad News In Schools

I have to admit that I was among a group of early supporters of Channel One, the widely acclaimed 12-minute television news program that’s beamed to about 8 million public school students across the country five days a week.

For me, this bold, innovative approach to bring news to the nation’s middle and high school classrooms represented a breath of fresh air when it began seven years ago - and was a heck of a public service. Currently, the program serves 12,000 schools nationwide.

I have always been a big advocate of exposing youngsters to news products early on. This journalistic venture, continued by K-III Communications following its 1994 acquisition from Whittle Communications, represented the best hope for news junkies like me to keep news in front of the nation’s kids.

That is the good news. The down side is that Channel One these days seems to have undergone some sort of commercial epiphany - if not a journalism about-face.

And that may be putting it mildly.

Ordinarily, commercial ventures are rewarded for expanding their advertising base - and for good reason. But this is no mundane commercial venture. In fact, the nation’s public schools initially were sold on the Channel One news program concept with the claim that commercials would be kept to an absolute minimum.

Somehow, though, on the way to success in the program, journalism seems to have gotten in the way of commercialism. And that definitely is not good news.

A report just out by a couple of researchers from Vassar College and Johns Hopkins University indicates only about 20 percent of the program’s content is actually news.

Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins, and William Hoynes, a Vassar sociologist, say they analyzed several dozen shows from 1995 and 1996 and found the news content in Channel One very questionable.

That’s a shame. So are the unnerving statistics that the remaining 80 percent of content is advertising, sports, weather and natural disasters.

Make no mistake, K-III Communications, which debunks the professors’ claims, is entitled to make a profit to stay in business. But it must know that its approach to news in the country’s public schools at this juncture is at variance with an objective stated earlier by the previous owner, Whittle Communications.

From my vantage point, this latest report on the once-heralded Channel One news program couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The nation’s schools literally are under seige by the advertising community, from school bus ads to commercial sponsorships, and de-emphasizing news even in an established forum like Channel One news can’t be much of a big help.

Or can it?

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fred Davis Washington State University