The daily news program was accompanied by commercial advertising for marketing in schools, with supplementary educational resources.

The Peabody award-winning Channel One News program was broadcast mainly to minors, advertising a way for young teens to understand happenings worldwide.

It began with a pilot program in four high schools before its national rollout in 1990, with original anchors and reporters Ken Rogers, Lynne Blades, and Brian Tochi.

Christopher Whittle founded it along with co-founder Ed Winter, advertising and marketing executives based in Knoxville, Tennessee.

[8] On May 13, 2014, Channel One was acquired by the educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; the company stated that the purchase would foster the "continued development of high-quality digital content for students, teachers, and parents across multiple modalities, and will bring significant video and cross-media production capabilities in-house.

2000: When OneVote returned in 2000, 877,497 students participated, choosing Texas Governor George W. Bush in a mock election with nearly 59% of the vote.

Critics claimed that it was a problem in classrooms because it forced children to watch ads and wasted class time and tax dollars.

[13] Supporters argued that the ads were necessary to help keep the program running and lease TVs, VCRs, and satellite dishes to schools, as well as commercial-free educational video through Channel One Connection.

[14] Another criticism, noted by Media Education Foundation's documentary Captive Audience, was that very little time was dedicated to actual news and that the majority of the programming was corporate marketing and PR tie-ins to promote products and services, arguing that it further corrupted the school setting with consumerism.