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Tuning out Channel One

So much for “Kill Your Television.” According to ADBUSTERS, two Ohio teenagers went to jail after refusing to watch Channel One, a television program (with commercials) that’s shown in schools across the United States. When DJ and Carlotta Maurer walked out of their classrooms to protest mandatory viewing of Channel One, the principal called them truants, and sent them to Wood County Juvenile Detention Center for the day.

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2/20 – Big oil’s big schemes Commercial Alert and Obligation, Inc., two groups that have been critical of Channel One’s programming, came to the Maurers’ defense. They wrote a letter to Ohio governor Bob Taft, asking him to remove Channel One from public schools. While the governor has yet to respond, the school in question is in negotiations with the Maurers, who said they have religious objections to television.

According to Primedia, Channel One’s parent company, shows like Channel One News and other “quality information and award-winning programming” from the company reach 8 million teenage viewers every school day.

Read the ADBUSTERS article here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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