Channel One

["Eric Nilsson" <enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re Channel One, Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Company and
related entities (I think K-III was renamed Primedia)---

>From Columbia Journalism Review, Jan/Feb 1995:

DART to the schoolchildren's newspaper Weekly Reader, for
demonstrating that education may be hazardous to your
health. Its October 14 article, "Do Cigarettes Have a
Future?" smelled like second-hand smoke from the
industry's recently fired-up p.r. campaign for
so-called smoker's rights, with a four-color cover
photo of out-of-work tobacco farmers at a Washington
demonstration for "Freedom of Choice"; with a text
that focused on the "unfairness" of antismoking laws
(subhead: the fight for rights) as well as on the
economic impact of those laws (subhead: bad for
business); and with a subliminal appeal to its
hundreds of thousands of young captive readers to
join the pack (black-and-white inside photo of
cool-looking kid being "forced by antismoking laws .
.. . to light up outdoors," as he stands in the shadow
of a Joe Camel billboard that reads it pays to be
smooth). As fuming health activists, unappeased by
the publication's more responsible insert poster for
teachers or by its previous pieces on the relation of
smoking and health, were swift to point out, Weekly
Reader is owned by K-III Communications, a unit of
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, which is the
controlling shareholder in RJR Nabisco, the nation's
largest maker of cigarettes (including Camels). Among
K-III's other holdings, added the Chicago Tribune in
an October 17 editorial, are Seventeen magazine, the
Channel One school satellite network, and various
school newspapers and book clubs; it is also the
largest distributor of high-school video and film
strips.

Eric
Eric Nilsson
Economics Department
CSUSB
San Bernardino, CA 92407
enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
909-880-5564