The bulk of the article “Warning: Advertising May be Hazardous to Your Health” isn’t news to me. Advertising is a powerful cultural force that shapes our attitudes, beliefs, values and lifestyles? It has a particularly strong effect on the perceptions of children and young people? It encourages materialism and promotes unrealistic and potentially unhealthy ideas about body image, relationships and sexuality? No kidding.
But what I did find particularly stirring in the article was the Channel One case study. It’s so interesting to me because I was myself a Channel One student, years ago at Park Street Middle School. At the time the idea that we would take a time-out in the middle of the day to watch a news program made sense. The educational merit of such an exercise is sound—shouldn’t students be informed about current affairs? Shouldn’t the education system do what it can to foster an interest and curiosity in the world around us? The idea sounds like a great one on paper so I have no trouble believing that teachers would comply with the program, and willingly so.
Of course the idea that the program was (and presumably still is) a vessel through which corporations might sneak their ads before the eyes of thousands of children hadn’t occurred to me until now. The article refers to these children as a “captive audience,” and of course this is exactly what they are. Even children who do not typically consume television advertisements don’t stand a chance with Channel One. It sounds like a nefarious scheme to me and it’d take an awful lot of convincing at this point to persuade me to believe otherwise. At 13 years old, the fact that a large portion of the daily program consisted of commercials seemed natural and inevitable. This is TV, and TV means ads. The real problem is that children are so susceptible (and vulnerable) to them.
I’m especially struck by the brief content-analysis the article provides, which notes that less than 20% of the program actually consists of news. I’m not surprised. The fact has bolstered one of my beliefs as a journalist—that as long as a program or package appears to be news then it is practically indistinguishable from it for the average viewer. I can construct an equally nefarious rationale for why Channel One might be structured in this way, and it might go like this: children don’t want to hear the news. The news is boring. Filling the program with cultural fluff pieces yields engaged, entertained viewers who are perfectly primed for imminent ad spots.
Fortunately, my younger sister has confirmed to me that schools in my district dropped the program a few years ago. Kids in Grove City, Ohio, at least, are spared.
Finally I want to point out how thankful I am for YouTube, through which you can still view some of the ad spots of the Pringles product described at length in the article. Though that particular ad is sadly not available, these are still worth watching. They are, of course, as hilariously bizarre as you would expect from a 90’s television commercial. Watching them I can’t help but think how much advertising has changed in the past two decades.
This sort of ad, where a potato chip company explicitly states the health merits of its product, simply would not fly. Our culture is too health conscious; we’d see right through it. More to the point, we’d probably laugh and roll our eyes—at least that was my immediate reaction to the Pringle spot. Ironically, this very fact might make us more vulnerable than ever, as advertisers resort to tactics that are much sneakier and more subversive.
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