Channel One is one part MacNeil-Lehrer and one part MTV. Its daily 12-minute show typically includes about seven minutes of news stories, three minutes of crowd-pleasing features-quizzes, opinion polls, eye-popping graphics–and two minutes of ads. It can be high-minded: shipping correspondents to Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti. It can be pop-minded: having teams of high-school students compete in “Jeopardy”-style current-events tests. And it can be a hybrid: for a spot on the death penalty, Channel One interviewed a teen killer and a prosecutor, then let two sets of students square off on the issue. Such features, called “You Decide,” are supposed to stimulate classroom discussions, too.
What Channel One actually shows has always been overshadowed by what it sells. Five years ago Whittle pledged to give schools free TVs, VCRs and satellite dishes in return for a captive audience. Advertisers loved this offer: these days, Gatorade, Sure deodorant and the makers of “The River Wild” each pay about $200,000 for 30-second spots. But many educators denounced the program and its soul-selling bargain. While most of the country has tuned in, education leaders in California and New York have kept the show out of more than 90 percent of their schools. Unplug an Oakland, Calif., grass-roots educational coalition, attacks the show as “exploitative and offensive.” The National Educational Association compares the advertisers to dope pushers “hooking kids for life.”
Channel One is having an impact in the classroom. One series on AIDS won a Peabody Award. A University of Michigan study released in February found that two thirds of the teachers using the show strongly recommend it. And it reported that student viewers scored at least 5 percent higher on general-information questions. (Whittle paid for the study, but Michigan had a free hand.)
Initially, Channel One’s real problem was its contents: pathetic bits of controversy-free, happy-talk news. But in 1992, Channel One CEO Ed Winter recruited David Neuman, a former Fox producer and NBC vice president for comedy development, to give Channel One a makeover. Now 34, Neuman is executive producer of the L.A.-based show. He pushed it into hard news: Whitewater, lessons of the Holocaust, conflict in the Mideast. His canniest feat was to recast the show’s young pro reporters as surrogate adventurers in journalism.
Anderson Cooper is in the tradition of old CBS war correspondents, literate, serious, bold. He’s 27, with the ardent, wary look of a Gap model. He joined Channel One in 1991, two years out of Yale. His father was Wyatt Cooper, a writer. His mother is the heiress/clothing magnate/writer Gloria Vanderbilt. After seven months as Channel One’s chief fact-checker he took off for Southeast Asia as a wanna-be reporter. Since then he’s bounced around the world from Burma to Haiti. In Somalia, returning from a skirmish, Cooper passed a ear full of journalists. They stopped to talk and Cooper mentioned his affiliation. “You’re risking your life,” someone asked, “for educational television?” Well, yes.
