Longtime advocate Peggy Charren not only supports children watching good, educational television programs, but she's even more interested in seeing kids read. And she has no problem at all with the current Harry Potter craze.
"When I started out, some 30 years ago, the reason was to get more connections between books, children and the TV set," she said. "If you watch the right television . . . you will read more."
Charren is a big proponent of shows on PBS like "Reading Rainbow," "Sesame Street" and "Between the Lions" — and of reading.
The founder of Action for Children's Television — who has won an Emmy, a Peabody and a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts — doesn't understand why anyone would want to fight against that, as some parents have in an effort to ban the enormously popular Harry Potter books.
"Reading about the parents who are afraid of the wizards in Harry Potter (books), you don't know if that was a 'Saturday Night Live' reporting in the newspaper or if it was real," Charren said.
(Those parents object to the presence of wizard, witches and magic in the books, despite the fact that evil is never portrayed in a good light.)
Charren said she's amazed at the number of people who want to ban this book or that book, but she doesn't want to stop people from expressing their opinions on the subject.
"It's a free country. It's a democracy," she said. "People can come up with absolutely inane, idiotic ideas and say them out loud, and that's good. . . . What's bad is if anybody with half a brain pays any attention to what they're saying."
The fourth book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament," is scheduled to be in bookstores on July 8. A theatrical film based on the first book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," is in the early stages of pre-production at Warner Bros.
You can reach Scott D. Pierce by e-mail at pierce@desnews.com