Edward Markey

Senator Edward Markey is a United States Senator from Massachusetts and one of the most consistent legislative defenders of public, educational, and government access television in Congress. His connection to communications policy runs deep: as a member of the House of Representatives, he served as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's telecommunications subcommittee beginning in 1987, co-authored the 1992 Cable Act, and was a principal author of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Those laws shaped the regulatory framework within which PEG channels have operated ever since.

As a Senator, Markey has introduced and repeatedly reintroduced legislation specifically protecting community television, including the Community Access Preservation Act and, in multiple Congresses, the Protecting Community Television Act - legislation designed to undo FCC rulemaking that allowed cable companies to count in-kind contributions against the franchise fees that fund PEG channels. When the Trump-era FCC issued that order in 2019, Markey led 15 Senate colleagues in urging the Commission to reverse course before introducing the legislative remedy. The ACM recognized his advocacy with its Humanistic Communication Award in 2016.

His work in this space reflects a consistent view: that PEG channels are not cable obligations or technical artifacts of a prior era, but civic infrastructure - televised town squares, as he has put it, where local citizens see and hear what is happening in their own community and can respond with their own voices. That framing has helped give the field language to use in its own defense at moments when the regulatory and financial ground has shifted beneath it.