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Compulsory Aducation In re Gault and due process rights Uncensored media considered harmless Reading, writing, and verbal torture KIDS and the Youth Liberation Conference |
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Letters from you
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Dedication to Josh Gilbert
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Oblivion 9 Spring 2000
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By Susan Wishnetsky & Justin Mallone This article originally appeared in the Sep./Oct. 2001 issue of Youth Truth, a zine produced quite regularly by Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions. For an annual subscription, send $10 to PO Box 11358, Chicago, IL 60611. In around 12,000 middle and high schools around the country, some 8 million students are now spending 12 minutes of every school day watching a TV show. Channel One, the daily news program designed to be broadcast in school classrooms and to appeal to young viewers, is not new. It was created in 1989 by Whittle Communications, which offered schools a free satellite dish, television sets and VCRs in exchange for their agreement to air at least 90% of the 12-minute programs, once a day in their entirety, in at least 80% of their classrooms.1 The costs of equipment, installation and maintenance (and of producing the show) are covered by Channel One's advertisers. In around 40% of America's schools, the daily lesson plan includes two minutes of commercials for such products as clothing, acne products, snack food, bubble gum, soft drinks, video games. Required by law to attend institutions supposedly devoted to education, students are also educated by corporations which may pay $200,000 for 30 seconds of commercial time.2 The audience for these commercials is literally a captive one, not permitted to change the channel or leave the room. Refusal to watch Channel One may be considered truancy or disobedience; in Ohio, two junior high school students spent a day in their county's juvenile detention center for refusing to watch Channel One.3 Aside from the commercials, is Channel One educational? It is hard for outsiders to know, since the company refuses to allow public access to its programs, or even to specific data about its distribution. Two researchers criticized this secrecy:4 After Channel One was threatened with a lawsuit, the company released 36 tapes from shows distributed in 1995 and 1996. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Vassar College, who analyzed the tapes, found only about 2 of the 10 minutes of programming devoted to "recent political, economic, social and cultural stories"; the remaining 8 minutes covered weather or natural disasters, sports, light features, music intros, self-promotion of Channel One, and banter between anchors and correspondents. 5 The program was also criticized for its narrow cultural focus; while its news staff was ethnically diverse, its on-camera sources and interviewees were found to be overwhelmingly "white and male". 6 Even so, poorly-funded schools may find the temptation of free equipment hard to resist. A study by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found that the program is most often shown in schools "in low-income communities ... where the least money is available for education."7 But the satellite dishes provided are only capable of receiving Channel One broadcasts, and the VCRs (2 per school) and television monitors (one per classroom) are only loaned to the school for the duration of its contract with Channel One. If the school does not renew, or fails to comply with the terms of its contract, the equipment is taken back.8 A joint study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. suggests that the value of the equipment may not come close to compensating schools for the value of the time they provide to Channel One.9 Senate hearings on Channel One were held in May 1999, prompting the company to hire a prominent Washington lobbying firm, spending nearly a million dollars to prevent further action.10 Professional organizations such as the NEA (National Education Association) and the PTA (National Parent-Teacher Association) have gone on record as opposing Channel One.11 New Jersey's Commissioner of Education attempted to ban the program, but reversed his decision under pressure from politicians and school administrators.12 New York's Department of Education, however, succeeded in banning Channel One; New York is now the only state in which the public schools may not broadcast Channel One.13 It seems to be difficult for Channel One's opponents to find compelling arguments against a program that provides schools with equipment, no matter what the "hidden costs" may be. Phyllis Schlafly of the right-wing group Eagle Forum disapproved of the rock music intros and some "inappropriate" movies and video games being advertised.14 The American Academy of Pediatrics objected to the ads for sweets and other less-than-nutritious foods.15 But the idea of forcing kids to view advertising in school doesn't seem to upset people much. Yes, it's probably wrong, but so what? Kids see advertising all the time. It can't do them much harm. And for some kids, Channel One news is the only news they watch; it's bound to be better than nothing. If it helps the schools, it's a fair trade-off, isn't it? There's little question that advertising can be effective in influencing purchasing behavior, in people of all ages. But advertising is not a bad thing; in fact, it's a source of information that can improve our lives. And advertising money does support the production of many well-made, intelligent TV shows and movies. But advertising can influence the content of what it sponsors. Advertisers may threaten to withdraw sponsorship of programming that is too controversial, as was reported to have happened to the Fox program Married With Children (in this case, other sponsors were found, and the program never did tone down its "political incorrectness"). They may also use their influence to suppress or alter content that relates to their own company or its products, as was reportedly the case with the sponsor's prohibition of "no smoking" signs from appearing in any news footage shown on the 1950s Camel News Caravan (a restriction that was honored by that show's producers). The power of advertisers to control the content of programming is tempered by the power of the viewers. The desire of TV producers to entertain the public and get high ratings can overcome the objections of many sponsors. As long as viewers have the ability to turn off the television or change the channel, TV producers will try to cater to what viewers want to watch, rather than what advertisers would like them to see. In the case of Channel One, however, viewers don't have this power. Whittle Communications sold Channel One in 1994. It is now owned by Primedia Corporation, a subsidiary of a large holding company that also owns tobacco giant RJR Nabisco Company.16 After this same company purchased the student news magazine Weekly Reader, it was noticed that articles on the health risks of tobacco, a topic that previously had been quite frequently addressed by the magazine, largely disappeared from its pages.17 If such a noticeable change in policy occurred with the buyout of Weekly Reader, couldn't the same kinds of bias be present in Channel One? Children are exposed to plenty of advertising and plenty of bias in their lives. While it's been found that many learn to recognize brand names and associate logos with products at very early ages, most quickly learn to read between the lines and take advertisers' claims with a grain of salt. But even if no harm is done, it is hard to imagine any group of adults submitting to a similar situation: forced by law to sit through a particular program-created for the profit of the company that owns it-five days a week, and expected to perform this duty willingly, as it is "for their own good." Adults are simply not permitted to be confined without their consent, except for inmates of prisons or mental hospitals (who cannot be confined without some due process proceedings-and who are not generally considered a target audience for advertisers anyway). The only group of adults one can think of who are (more or less) confined by law without due process are people serving on juries. True, they can usually "opt out" of the jury pool by not registering to vote, and it is usually possible to get out of jury duty if one is highly motivated. Further, jurors know that their compliance is a service to the court-a civic duty, but one performed for the court's benefit, not their own. However, once one reports for jury duty, one is expected to remain for at least a full day (and possibly for the duration of a trial), and abide by the rules of the courtroom and the orders of the judge. So Primedia could conceivably create a series of videos, perhaps on the topic of jury service, to be shown to this captive audience. Although many court systems could surely use the kind of equipment Primedia loans to schools, I don't imagine any court would agree to show a program with advertising to their prospective jurors; the risk of tainting a jury would be too great. Even if they did, the audience would surely not be expected to view the program seriously; poking fun at the program would likely be the expected response. The exposure of these individuals to the program for a few days (or even weeks) would not add up to very much time, unlike schoolkids, for whom the exposure to Channel One's ads-just the ads-over seven years of school attendance can potentially add up to more than 45 hours. Those hours are worth a lot to Channel One's advertisers. Primedia, which also publishes such magazines as Seventeen and Soap Opera Digest (the company recently sold off the Weekly Reader), reported a net loss of $120 million in 1999, but Channel One, bringing about $346 million in ad revenues that same year, was probably the company's biggest money-making product.18 Primedia is the only company, so far, to use this particular approach to introduce television advertising into classrooms, but a company called ZapMe! Corp. recently tried to imitate Channel One's tactics, offering free computers and an internet connection (with plenty of ads targeted at kids) to schools that agreed to require students to use them for a certain amount of time each day.19 But companies have used various techniques to get advertising into schools for years. Soft drink companies regularly make contracts with schools to keep out competing brands. Advertising may appear on school walls, lunch menus, or athletic fields and score-boards. While the state of New York banned Channel One in public schools, they didn't rule out placing advertising on and inside school buses, and have recently contracted with several companies to do so.20 In 1999, the McGraw-Hill publishing company was criticized for a mathematics workbook containing product names and logos in story problems.21 Other companies have created curricular supplements which incorporate the brand names of their products into math or science exercises. Educational posters offered to schools for display on classroom walls may also feature recognizable company logos. Some videos on environmental issues, distributed to schools as educational supplements, have turned out to be nothing more than public relations vehicles for the major oil companies that produced them.22 One middle school in Florida accepted an offer by McDonalds to present a seven-week class on the fast-food business, which covered applying and interviewing for a job, how McDonalds are run, and the design of their restaurants; the school felt that the free instruction was a good deal. One 10-year-old participant commented that students whose life goal is to work at McDonalds "already know what to do."23 Even companies that don't advertise in schools try to profit from them. Breakfast cereals have long offered customers the chance to "help their schools" by saving boxtops or barcodes (and thereby buying more cereal!); now a soup company has launched a similar promotion. And major office supply and discount stores have begun to trumpet their programs "for the schools"-which encourage sales by matching customer dollars with donations. Meanwhile, the founder of Channel One invented a new, and perhaps even more profitable, way to make money in the field of public education: the Edison Project, a chain of for-profit charter schools which receive public funds to operate.24 This chain of so-called "McSchools" (a topic for another article-stay tuned!) has expanded rapidly and has made overtures to European countries with proposals for overseas markets for their schools, a proposition called "chilling" by the British publication New Statesman.25 It is ironic that one of the supposed goals of compulsory education was to keep children from being exploited by businesses for profit; now businesses are finding ways to use these laws to their advantage. One can hardly blame them for seizing an opportunity, since the primary goal-and obligation-of most businesses is to sell "most anything that is legal"26 to anyone they can. Their job is to make money, not to promote social welfare. Nevertheless, profiting from compulsory education laws is a form of exploitation of youth. While certainly not as harsh as parents or others forcing kids into working grinding hours, any situation that allows for a "legally" captive audience to be forced to endure advertising by government-favored corporate sponsors is morally wrong. It would be a dramatically different situation if youth chose to attend an academic institution that happened to have some level of advertising. And this is where many anti-ads-in-schools organizations miss the point-it's not so much that ads are in schools; it's that the kids are forced to be there in the first place. If youth had a say in the way schools were run-by voting in school board elections, or even broader political power-they would at least have a voice in any foolish experiments a school district decided to try out on them. And if youth were allowed to choose their own educational experiences-to educate themselves, or opt out, rather than being forcibly educated by others-the ethical problems with Channel One would cease to exist, as would many other problems that have eternally plagued the schools. Only if children are not forced to attend can the problems of "disruptive" students ever be eliminated. And only when schools are no longer guaranteed a "captive" audience can they become truly competitive. ReferencesCompulsory aducation
To make intelligent decisions, voters and policy-makers need information on the nature of private vendors seeking public business. In a democratic society, such information is the basis for open evaluation and discussion.... Despite the fact that the bulk of Channel One's revenue derives from its access to public schools, important information about Channel One is concealed behind a proprietary curtain.