This week, CCFC sent a letter to state school superintendents detailing the reasons why Channel One should not be shown in schools, including:
It’s waste of students’ time and taxpayers’ money. In exchange for the loan of outdated video equipment, schools agree to show a 12-minute newscast – including 2 minutes of commercials – every day. Schools with Channel One lose more than a week of instructional time each year, including a full day just to the commercials!
Channel One violates its contract with schools by exceeding the agreed-upon limit on commercial content. In addition to regular commercials, Channel One integrates advertising into its actual newscast. For instance, on May 23, 2012, Channel One’s entire 12-minute broadcast was devoted to promoting four television shows on the ABC Family network.
Channel One promotes websites that are inappropriate for children and teens, including the highly sexualized gURL.com; Live Psychic Readings, which charges $7.49/minute; and the controversial website Spokeo.com, which was fined $800,000 by the Federal Trade Commission in June for the misuse and sale of personal data.
If state education departments investigate and publicize what Channel One is doing in classrooms and on its student-targeted website, it’s likely that educators will pull the plug. But they will only act if there is significant pressure to do so. Will you urge your state to investigate Channel One and help us put an end to the worst-of-the-worst in in-school advertising??
Source: http://griid.org/2012/08/20/challenging-channel-ones-commercial-influence-in-our-schools/
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Revised 04/17/2016
