The New Republic - October 25, 1999
Changing the Channel
By: Russ Baker
Russ Baker is a New York-based investigative journalist. Additional reporting by
Rachel Tsutsumi.
The folks at Channel One--the "televisions in the classroom" company--
probably never imagined they'd be celebrating their tenth anniversary with a
vicious battle against a most unlikely foe.
Back in 1989, Channel One, the brainchild of entrepreneur Chris Whittle, came on
like gangbusters, offering advertisers new opportunities to reach teenage
consumers and giving cash-strapped schools a cost-effective way to acquire
audiovisual equipment. Channel One would lend schools TV sets, videotape
players, and school-wide broadcasting apparatuses that could double as high-tech
public-address systems. In return, the schools' students would watch Channel
One's daily twelve-minute broadcast, which consisted of ten minutes of
current-events programming and two minutes of advertising, often sold at
network-level rates. As the thenpresident of Channel One would boast to a
youth-marketing conference in 1994, " T he advertiser gets a group of kids
who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station, who cannot listen
to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing Nintendo, who
cannot have their headsets on."
Not surprisingly, this concept was fairly controversial, particularly among
liberals. When Channel One was founded in 1989, liberal programming activists
and consumer rights crusaders immediately raised a stink. A coalition of 50
organizations--including the National Education Association, the American
Federation of Teachers, and the American Academy of Pediatrics--formed to oppose
Channel One. But Channel One weathered the storm, and most of its liberal
opponents eventually moved on to other issues. Meanwhile, Whittle sold Channel
One to Primedia in 1994. Today, it is watched by 40 percent of American
teenagers.
But Channel One faces a new threat. This time, though, it comes not from the
left but from the right. Groups such as the Family Research Council, founded by
Gary Bauer, and Focus on the Family, headed up by the activist James Dobson, are
campaigning to dramatically alter Channel One, if not to shut it down
completely. So are Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and
Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. In June, the 15.9-million- member Southern
Baptist Convention passed a resolution condemning Channel One and urging parents
"to seek effective ways to protect their children from the advertising
assault of the network."
And the network is running scared. Unlike the situation ten years ago, when
Channel One was able to more or less ignore the initial storm of protests
against it, this time the company has had to launch an aggressive
counteroffensive. Which raises the question: Has Channel One finally met its
match?
The conservative backlash against Channel One began in December 1994, when Pat
Ellis, an Alabama housewife and conservative Republican, discovered that her two
sons were obliged to watch the daily twelve-minute Channel One broadcasts at
their school. Ellis was alarmed that a large corporation could dictate
curriculum without local input and that the curriculum included proselytizing to
schoolchildren on behalf of junk food, violent movies, and other products. She
also became upset when her sons came home talking about how it might make sense
to legalize drugs--an opinion they got, apparently, from seeing a Channel One
interview with Joycelyn Elders. Within a year, Ellis, with the help of local
business leaders, clergy, and parents, had persuaded her school system to turn
off Channel One.
In the spring of 1996, Ellis enlisted the aid of Jim Metrock, a prominent
Alabama businessman who was one of the founding board members of the Business
Council of Alabama and who had recently written an op-ed on "trash TV"
for the Birmingham News. Although Metrock knew nothing about Channel One, his
son informed him that he'd been watching the broadcasts in school for three
years. Metrock was incensed by the mandated use of class time for watching
commercials; he dedicated Obligation, Inc., his vest-pocket nonprofit group, to
expelling Channel One from Alabama classrooms. Over the past two years, the
group has done just that, persuading a number of Alabama's school systems to
either dump Channel One or simply broadcast it before the day's first bell.
Metrock estimates that 75,000 students in Alabama who used to watch Channel One
no longer do so. Not content to restrict their efforts to Alabama, Metrock and
Ellis successfully lobbied one of their senators, Republican Richard Shelby, to
hold hearings on Channel One in May 1999, and the two courted support from
national conservative groups.
Not surprisingly, Channel One didn't take this lying down. To counter the
growing campaign against it, the company hired former Christian Coalition
executive-turned-consultant Ralph Reed to shore up its conservative credentials.
Not long after that, the pro-business Citizens Against Government Waste issued a
press release in support of Channel One, and Grover Norquist, president of
Americans for Tax Reform, wrote a sympathetic op-ed about the network for The
Washington Times.
But it was in Alabama that the Channel One counteroffensive mobilized most
visibly. Earlier this year, a seemingly spontaneous conservative grassroots
movement emerged in support of the network. Judson Hill, a former official of
Promise Keepers, the men's Christian movement, sent out a memo to a handful of
fellow conservatives asserting that Planned Parenthood was lobbying against
Channel One. (Planned Parenthood officials say the national organization has
never taken a position on Channel One.) The Reverend Lou Sheldon of the
California-based anti-homosexual and anti-abortion group Traditional Values
Coalition (TVC), who had initially opposed Channel One, sent out a 15-minute
video to Alabama pastors in support of it. (TVC was recently in the news when
the Orange County Register reported that the California Fair Political Practices
Commission had found that gambling interests secretly paid Sheldon's son to
generate religious opposition to new, competing card clubs. Sheldon insists that
TVC's positions on both issues are based on their respective merits and that TVC
has "not received one single penny" from Channel One.) And Alabama
talk radio, Christian, and country-and-western stations began carrying ads
emphasizing Channel One's conservative credentials. "Channel One ... tells
teens to turn their backs on drugs, reject violence, and abstain from sex before
marriage," proclaimed one ad. "And it's working.... But some on the
radical left want Congress to ban such programming. Call Senator Richard Shelby
... and tell him to stand up for Channel One's right to teach our kids to say no
to drugs and no to sex before marriage."
Jeff ballabon, a Channel One executive vice president, denied funding the
Alabama pressure campaign. Rather, the sponsor of the radio ads appears to be
Dax Swatek, the only person publicly identified with a previously unknown group
called the Coalition to Protect Our Children. As a 28-year-old law student,
though, Swatek wouldn't appear to have the resources to mount such an effort,
and Metrock's camp says that a well-connected consulting firm, the McWhorter
Group, was involved in developing the campaign against Channel One. The firm's
head, Pat McWhorter, declined to say whether he had done any work on Channel
One's behalf or whether he had any ties to Swatek.
But when my research assistant made a separate call to McWhorter's office and
asked for Swatek, a receptionist offered to provide his cell-phone number or
even patch the call through to him. Swatek did not return messages left on his
voice mail or with a man who said he was Swatek's roommate. The impression that
Metrock and other opponents have is that Channel One is directly behind the
Alabama effort but works through middlemen.
Ballabon insists that it's Channel One's critics who are deceptive: "
There's a lot of lying about us that goes on." He called the network's
critics little more than a few "rabble-rousers," and claims that
Channel One supporters feel harassed and threatened by Metrock.
Metrock, a genial man who chooses his words carefully, is undeterred by such
remarks. For one thing, he's convinced that the more parents learn about Channel
One, the more they'll want to get it out of their children's classrooms.
Moreover, Metrock is encouraged that he and other conservatives have found
common cause with some liberals, such as Ralph Nader, in their opposition to the
network. According to Metrock, it's just a matter of time before he and his
allies, old and new, bring the network down.
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