Every school day, all around the country, nearly 8 million students are watching Channel One's daily public affairs program, a 12-minute mix of news, features and advertisements.

Did I say watching? It might be more accurate to say, "existing in the same general vicinity as," or "dimly aware of." It turns out many of these students are paying even less attention to Channel One than they are to their parents' suggestions about what to wear to the next mixer.

I find this very comforting. Channel One, owned by Primedia, has weaseled its way into our educational institutions by offering schools free satellite dishes and television sets. To get the goodies, schools have to promise to air the morning show on 90 percent of school days. Each show has about 10 minutes of news and 2 minutes of advertisements. It's an arrangement that is easy to deplore, and has generated a lot of hand-wringing about selling out a captive audience of teens to the purveyors of fast food, video games, and other empty calories of consumerism.

But a new study from Washington State in the current issue of Pediatrics reveals that while Channel One is marginally more effective at shilling products to our kids than informing them about the key issues of the day, its performance on both fronts is pretty dismal -- with students remembering only about 11 percent of the ads and 13 percent of the news stories that aired during a week.

As one high school student explained, "When Channel One is on, I do my homework or I talk with my friends." In other words, this multi-tasking generation is nobody's captive audience.