Channel One Recruiting Children Into Military

The US government is placing recruiting advertisements on Channel One. For those who are not familiar with Channel One, it is:

"a twelve-minute television news program targeted to teenagers and distributed via satellite to over 12,000 middle and high schools across the United States each school day morning. This represents an audience of over eight million students, with thousands of other schools currently on a waiting list to receive the program. Channel One became, almost from its inception, a highly controversial educational program offering, primarily because two minutes of each program are devoted to advertising." (Channel One: U.S. Proprietary Programming Service)

Between the use of the primary school educational channel, and virtually unfettered access to schools and information under the vaunted No Child Left Behind Act, recruiting children is like capturing fish in a barrel. Channel One is shown in many schools and there are certainly incentives for schools to become "Channel One Schools." If schools sign a contract with Channel One, they get a slew of video and computer equipment (for as long as they keep the contract). This raises the issue that Channel One would be more likely to find a niche in public rather than private schools, and economically distressed rather than affluent schools. [thanks to Donna]