I just wanted to say, that, there is a channel one. It just doesn’t appear on regular television. It comes in at my school, and it came (and still does) in at the middle school i went to. We were forced to watch Channel One everymorning. Actully…it was “Channel One News” we were forced to watch.
The column being talked about is Why isn’t there a Channel One on TV?, which also appears on page 372 of The Straight Dope. This column is nearly thirty years old, but in the system used in the Americas and Japan, there is still is no over-the-air Channel One. (However, nowadays many cable systems have added a Channel One for their cable subscribers to use, and the over-the-air setups used in Europe and most of Asia have always had their own Channel One).
The “Channel One” at school you mentioned is a catchy name for a program that they came up with. However, that program is distributed by special satellite, and can’t be picked up by any regular TVs, even if you had one of the old TVs that included Channel One.