Charren, Peggy (born Walzer) (1928– )

US consumer activist. In 1968, upset at the violence and other defects she saw on children's television programmes, she founded Action for Children's Television, which became a national watchdog organization, working strenuously to improve the quality of children's television. She disbanded it in 1992, because the passage of the Children's Television Act in 1990 fulfilled many of its objectives.

She was born in New York City. The mother of two children, she founded an art prints store in 1951 and ran Quality Book Fairs 1960–65, in Newton, Massachusetts. She wrote Changing Channels: Living Sensibly with Television (1983) and was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1987.