Paramount Wants Your Child’s Attention

February 29, 2008

Channel One turns classrooms over to Paramount Studios
Actual still pictures of what students were forced to watch.

On February 15, Channel One News ran a commercial for Paramount Studio’s "The Spiderwick Chronicles." The movie is rated PG which means it’s one of the less offensive movies advertised during the classroom channel’s 17-year history.

The fact that it is not a PG13 movie, however, shouldn’t give parents and teachers much comfort. The time wasted promoting the financial interests of Paramount Studios should be unacceptable for all those seriously concerned with education.

If a school has 500 students and they were watching Channel One, then the school would have lost a total of 4 student hours of school time on that ONE DAY. (500 x .30 second ad)

Now some school principals would have no problem with that. What’s the big deal with one child wasting 30 seconds watching a promo for a Hollywood movie? These principals see "waste" as inevitable. These are either inexperience or burned out principals that feel that they can never make their schools better. These principals look at Channel One News as a "nice little babysitter" for a student body that doesn’t have anything better to do.

Good schools don’t have Channel One. That’s the bottom line.

One can’t help but feel sorry for those schoolchildren that have to spend their valuable class time watching one Hollywood studio after another plug their latest movies.