THE CHAMPION OF CHILDREN’S TV

When “Entertainment Tonight” and “CBS Sunday Morning” recently wanted to interview Peggy Charren, they flew their TV crews to an island off Cape Cod where she was staying.

Such notoriety makes her giggle, especially when she recalls how far she has come from the evening 20 years ago when several friends gathered in her suburban Boston living room to see how they might improve the quality and diversity of television for their children.

Today when people discuss children’s television, chances are good that someone will raise Charren’s name, along with the group she founded, Action for Children’s Television.

To many people, Charren has become the conscience of children’s television programming.

Over the years, her group has petitioned federal regulators on a variety of issues from the content of commercials to the amount of daily programming for children. In particular, ACT has complained about cartoon shows that Charren says are really program-length commercials for toys.

She has brought Big Bird, Captain Kangaroo and Minnie Mouse to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers as part of a National Children’s Television Awareness Week, has spoken out tirelessly before congressional committees and other forums on behalf of better children’s television and has prodded lawmakers to introduce legislation to compel broadcasters to air more educational programming.

A few weeks ago, ACT won a major court victory that put Charren in the news again. The U. S. Court of Appeals here ordered the Federal Communications Commission to review a 1984 decision that overturned a long-standing FCC policy requiring commercial broadcasters to make a special effort to meet the unique needs of children.

“The court case says something to the powers that make the country work. It says our issues are real,” Charren says. “Otherwise we would look like a group of overactive parents.”

She says the message to the FCC is now clear. “The FCC doesn’t have to do anything,” she says of the recent court ruling. But “if they don’t, the courts and Congress will go get them.”

Charren, who in one newspaper article described her constituency as being “very short, very young and (having) very small allowances,” has focused her crusade on the nation’s capital because she has always considered children’s television “first and foremost, a political issue.”

“I think the hope of the future lies in elected officials who care about children,” Charren said. “I think the public has to depend on rules created by public officials in a democracy.”

Charren believes that children, along with the country as a whole, have suffered as a result of the deregulatory efforts and budget priorities of the Reagan Administration.

“I think the 1990s are going to be a time of caring about children,” she says. “I think the 1980s were nasty to kids. With the change in the Senate and what I assume will be a new Administration, that will change.”

It is also why the recent appeals court decision is so important for her, and why she continues to come to Washington to testify on related broadcast matters. She is hopeful that after a political hiatus, children’s television is once again on the public agenda.

“Children are beginning to show up in other places in telecommunications,” she says. “It means that our issue is sexy again.” And there is some other good news. The alternative technologies--from cable television to videocassette recorders--now make possible all kinds of viewing choices that didn’t exist when ACT was started in 1968.

Though Charren cautions that the new technologies generally are more available to the affluent, she wonders whether she would have started ACT if home video had existed then for her two young daughters. “It’s amazing how your own life influences how you look at issues,” she says.

Charren’s first job was running the film department at an independent New York station. She later worked for a math magazine, ran a framing and art gallery and then moved to Boston with her husband where she ran children’s book fairs. After her second daughter was born, she stopped working and ran a volunteer arts program for schools in Newton.

That was until ACT was organized, not out of a desire to protect children from television, she says, but from a curiosity to learn why programming wasn’t better and why children had to be subjected to advertising in the programs.

“The beginning of ACT was all luck,” says Charren, whose dedication, energy and enthusiasm have never waned. The low-budget, grass-roots group subscribed to a few trade magazines and read all of the gossip on the industry. They asked the three major TV networks for meetings, but only got a response from CBS. So Charren and two friends went to New York to meet with some CBS executives.

They also set up a meeting with the FCC commissioners in 1970. “We didn’t have any feel for how unusual it was to do this,” she says. As Charren recalls, a sympathetic Dean Burch, then FCC chairman, told them that after watching television with his 5-year-old son, he understood why they had requested a meeting.

In retrospect, she says, the meeting was one of ACT’s most important decisions because “nobody in the industry would listen until the FCC would listen.”

Out of that meeting grew an FCC inquiry into children’s programming and advertising practices that drew more than 100,000 letters from citizens. The regulatory agency stopped far short of adopting ACT’s proposals to ban commercials from children’s programs and to require that stations broadcast at least 14 hours a week of children’s programs, but it clearly expressed the view that “the use of television to further the educational and cultural development of America’s children bears a direct relationship to the licensee’s obligation under the Communications Act to operate in the ‘public interest.’ ”

In its early days, ACT was so small that when there was a need to travel out of town, “we had debates about whether to drive or fly because we were using our own household budgets.” Charren says it also taught them early that “it’s hard to get your voice heard if you don’t have any money.”

In 1970, ACT got a two-year grant from the Markle Foundation for $165,000. Over time there were contributions from other foundations, corporations and individual members, and some royalties from several books. At its peak in the mid-1970s, ACT employed 18 people, had a budget of $500,000 and published its own newsletter. Today ACT operates with a budget of about $150,000, employing three full-time staffers and some interns.

“When we started to get effective, some people thought of us as thorns and for others we helped create a livelihood,” she said. “There are least as many good friends as people who wished we never started.”

About a year and a half ago, Charren actually gave some thought to shutting down ACT. The two-story house in Newtonville, Mass. that was ACT’s headquarters was purchased by a developer and knocked down. The extensive library on children and the media was given to Harvard University’s School of Education.

Instead, Charren chose to operate a slimmed-down organization from a small suite of offices in Cambridge, Mass., a few steps from the condominium where she and her husband Stanley live.

Now there are new projects, including one this fall that will focus on children and television news and will include a booklet on TV news for parents. Charren says that “very often TV news is not terribly satisfying as children’s programming. It tends to be violent, scary and show things disturbing to children.”

ACT’s message to parents: Either turn the television off when the news comes on or help your children deal with it, rather than sitting passively and wishing for “nice news” to come on.

Charren is also thinking about a televised magazine show for children that would include news events and would help teach children about the country. “We think the television entertainment departments don’t hear us, so we are going to talk to the people who make the news work and their bosses,” she says.

Who knows what will happen after that?

“ACT has always felt very fragile,” says Charren. “We don’t talk about ourselves being here forever. I didn’t want it to be here forever. I wanted to set up a structure for broadcasters to do programming without me around.

“Although it’s appropriate for the public to make noise, it shouldn’t be necessary to keep making the same noise forever,” she says.