Corporate 'Big Brother' Eyes a Captive Audience
Tom McConaghy · Phi Delta Kappan · 1993
The storm that raged in the U.S. around the launching of Channel One's controversial ad-supported news program for high school students is now in full force in Canada. Youth News Network (YNN), modeled on Whittle Communication's Channel One, is desperately wooing school boards to sign on. At the same time, it is also seeking corporate sponsorship and government assistance. Like its counterpart in the U. S., is offering school boards a 12-minute package of news and information that includes a mandatory two minutes and 30 seconds of combined commercial advertisements and public service announcements. It is this commercial aspect of the daily broadcast to students between the ages of 13 and 19 that has many parents and educators concerned. The bait held out to induce school boards to agree to take this broadcast for their schools is $50,000 worth of equipment, consisting of one television Monitor for every 29 students, two VCRs, satellite receiving equipment, and one portable video camera. However, a large portion of the $50,000 would be spent on monitoring devices for use by YNN. Through this monitoring, Big Brother wants to track how and when its TV equipment is used, the time of day the program is shown, the length of the broadcast, and even the volume of the broadcast. The auditing will be accomplished by having a microprocessor attached to each television set. says very bluntly that such monitoring allows the company to determine which of the equipped classrooms have played the entire 12-minute program and to gain statistical information. These data are needed, asserts, to show advertisers that no one zapped away from advertisements as they can do at home. Rod MacDonald, YNN'S president, is very open about the need for such control when he acknowledges that sponsors will not foot the bill if they think teachers are unplugging the TV sets during the cormmercials. However, this means that advertisers maintain fairly strict control over the broadcasts they support, while teachers have very little say as to how and when the broadcasts are used in their classrooms. Educators are dismayed that school boards entering into such agreements with are subtly disempowering teachers by restricting their freedom to teach the curriculum for which they are employed. justifies its intrusion into the classroom by joining the ranks of other big corporations and becoming a vocal advocate of school reform. But is really interested in improving the quality of Canadian Schools? This is a question that Parents Against Commercial Television in School (PACTS), an Edmonton-based group, is trying to answer in a 19-page assessment of YNN's real purpose in pressuring school boards to accept the program. That report asserts that YNN wants to buy the opportunity to actively restrict the attention of our students during school hours for commercial [1] claims that its program will promote media literacy. But the Canadian Association of Media Literacy Organizations, an umbrella group representing six provincial organizations across Canada, challenges such a claim and believes that has deliberately misappropriated the goals of media education for its own purposes. Many educators and parents find that commercials are not the only insidious aspect of the corporate presence in the classroom. probably declares its true philosophy when it states in its promotional literature: Perhaps will have its greatest impact in the moral and education and in the personal and education programs. No other medium other than television can best illustrate issues such as human rights, freedoms, injustice and justice, sex education and interpersonal relationships. But parents and educators want to know how television, a medium that speaks mainly through images, can best illustrate religious freedoms and social justice when these are, according to Robert deChazal, author of the PACTS critique, essentially ideas, more die stuff of words dm flashy television. …