Peggy Charren

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Peggy Charren (born 1928) founded Action for Children's Television (ACT) in 1968 in an effort to improve the quality of children's television programming. In 1989, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded her its Trustees' Award. Her work with ACT culminated in the passage of the Children's Television Act of 1990, and she received a Peabody Award in 1991. In 1992, she disbanded ACT, announcing that it had met the objectives she had set out to accomplish. In 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

She is an outspoken critic of censorship, and has taken a public stand against the American Family Association's campaigns to ban various programs. She sits on the Board of Trustees of public broadcaster WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts.

Peggy lives in Massachusetts with her husband Stanley, a wind power entrepenuer who serves on Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Environment Council.

[edit] Quotations

"Violent television teaches children that violence is the solution to problems, that violent behavior can be fun and funny, that criminals and police make up a larger percentage of the population than they really do, and that violent behavior is practiced by heroes as well as by villains. But you can't say that there shouldn't be any violence on television. It is the context that is really important. Too often, children are the excuse for banning speech: words and pictures in comic books, movies, classic stories, textbooks and television. But government censorship is not the way to protect children from inappropriate content."