Hey, I liked Green Acres…does that make me a hick-wannabe ?
It would be helpful if you would provide a link to the column in question.
Here is the article: Why is there no Channel One on television?
Interestingly enough, now in schools, school districts can sign up for a service that provides video feeds to classrooms, including a daily 15-minute informative news broadcast. The name of the service? Channel One.
But it’s a satellite service, and not actually one channel anything. ChannelOne is just a cool sounding name.
The place is also run by the biggest bunch of idiots on the face of the earth. Fortunately I do not work for them any more. 
Oh, and on the NYC cable system, channel one is a local news station.
Channel 1 (and channel 0 and channel -1 and VHF channels 14 and up, which are different from the UHF channels with the same numbers) are all available on cable, since the rival uses apply only to over-the-air. Different cable channels make different uses of them.
If I go to “channel one” on my Time Warner Cable in Akron Ohio, I get…nothing. Snow. Nothing.
In the Chicago area (at least), Comcast cable uses Channel 1 for their OnDemand service – streaming-video-over-cable, some of which is pay-per-view. Before they introduced the service, that channel was empty.