Study trade-offs carefully

Chances are, most of the people reading this are adults. And chances are they still can remember the jingles and slogans of the commercials they heard when they were in school, even if that was 40, 50 or more years ago. Such is the power of advertising. It's designed to be that way. It's why companies shell out big bucks for 30 seconds of your time.

It's also why few people should be surprised by a study, reported in this newspaper, that most students remember more about the advertising they see on Channel One than they do the news and public affairs programming. It's hard to write news copy in iambic pentameter or to set it to catchy music.

Still, the study out of Washington State University found that students could remember only 3.5 ads seen on the network, on average, compared to 2.7 news stories. They weren't able to remember much about the content of either. Maybe ad executives aren't as savvy as they used to be.

However, the study has raised, once again, questions over whether Channel One is an appropriate daily invader into public school systems. The network claims to reach 8 million students in 350,000 American classrooms. It is funded mostly by advertising. In exchange for showing the programs each day, schools that contract with Channel One receive televisions and satellite equipment for free. This trade-off allows schools to receive things they normally couldn't afford on their current diet of tax revenues. It also gives Channel One enormous influence over children.

Most kids are media-savvy, to a point. If they weren't influenced by advertising, companies wouldn't aim commercials at them. It has ever been so. But while children long ago may have understood that Winston was deliberately using bad grammar in its cigarette commercials, they weren't watching those commercials on televisions sanctioned by their schools. Today, cigarette ads are out, but video game and music ads are in. The principle, however, is the same.

A recent report in Advertising Age identified controversial Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff as having represented Channel One's parent company, Primedia. Perhaps it's time for school districts to begin looking closely again at Channel One and what it offers. The network has been suffering from declining ad revenues each year since 2002, according to Hoover's Company Profiles. That may make it more desperate to try new advertising strategies.

Public schools nationwide face economic problems. Utah isn't the only state where teachers and administrators complain of a lack of state funding. But the trade-offs always should be considered carefully. Some schools, in places other than Utah, are now selling naming rights to buildings, classrooms or schools themselves, to the highest bidder. Many others here already furnish vending machines that sell snacks lacking in nutrition.

With each deal, schools lose a bit of freedom and make tacit endorsements to their students. Perhaps Channel One is worth the equipment. But somebody ought to be making a regular, detailed accounting and evaluation of that.