Hello my southern Brothers and Sisters. I just saw Morgan Spurlocks new documentary "POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" and wanted to clairify something. He mentioned that in US schools there is a "news" channel that is broadcast in all Jr High and High Schools for about 12 Min every day. It includes news storys, but is also filled with Commercials. According to the film, it said that the only benefit to the school is a free tv in every class used to watch the broadcast. Is this right? Am I missing somthing?
This would have been news 10+ years ago, I remember watching Channel 1 News most days, but they didn't always turn on the TV's to show it. The cool thing about a TV in every class you didn't have to share equipment when you wanted to play documentaries or movies. Also my school once broadcast a movie to all the TV's at the end of the school year.
I remember the TV's were old, like early mid 90's old, and looking at the Wiki Page, Channel 1 stated in 1994.
I graduated in 1997 and we had Channel one, but when I had gone back a few years later at the request of one of my old teachers, they weren't showing it anymore.
While it may not new to you people in the states it seems crazy to me... The example in the film showed the kids watching an ad for prince of persia and a acne medication commercial. It just seems so odd that the Various school boards would allow such blatant advertisement directly to such a captive audience. I suppose I could get behind it if the schools benefited, but it didn't seem like it.
Lisa Ling got her start on that show. Man it was lame. The teachers all hated it. The students all hated it. My school ran its own student-made ads that spoofed Channel 1's hamminess. That was the most awesome part that came from it. That, and in one of their reports on a flood, this reporter girl fell down in the water and some guy rowing by her in a little boat laughed. Other than that, complete waste of time.
we never watched it in school, and i am 19 though for some reason now the middle school has satillite tv in the lunchroom so the kids can watch cartoons during lunch yet at the time we were going through a paper shortage.... my school was dumb sometimes
As a Canadian, I find the concept pretty bizarre. We never had any TV channel specially designed for school. Sometimes we'd watch like, a movie adaptation of a book in English class, or a documentary in History, but it was definitely not a "12 minutes daily" thing. That's just weird.
We had it back in the early 90's. my memories are fuzzy but IIRC, we watched the start of the First Gulf War on Channel 1. (yeah, i am THAT effin' old...) We watched it during our homeroom period before classes started each day. My Junior and Senior years in High School, i used to get reprimanded by the administration for trying to write sarcastic articles about Channel 1 for our school paper. I never saw the fuss over Channel 1 other than maybe there was a contract clause preventing any negativity towards it? i always made fun of the host...I think it was Kate Morgendorfer at the time. She had a name you'd expect to see as the annoying neighbor on TV. The one positive that came from the TVs for shooting impressionable fish in the barrel deal was that someone donated 4 cameras, 2 VCRs and an idiot proof video editor that allowed us to make our own news broadcasts that we played after Channel 1.
