ABSTRACT
Peggy Charren's dogged persistence finally pushed the Children's Television Act of 1990 into existence despite the objections of a Republican president. It was to be her organization's swan song; she retired in 1993, folding the Action for Children's Television as she went. The Republican-led Federal Communication Commission (FCC) at the time the law was passed wrote the kind of wink-wink regulations that made it easy for broadcasters not to take the law seriously. It was not until Charren's successors, the Washington-based Center for Media Education, motivated legislators and regulators in the new Clinton administration to re-examine the market and the law that the 1990 Act took on substance. A syndicator splits the advertising time with the local station and with the local station collecting revenues from ads it can place. And the syndicator receiving revenues from national ad time is potentially lucrative if enough stations in enough markets place the program at a good enough time for children to watch.
