The Community Television Association of Maine is committed to furthering the following Core Values as set forth by the Alliance for Community Media. They were created by Sue Buske for the ACM West Conference:

Localism: Supports local viewpoints, local perspectives, and the interests of local communities. Most mainstream media programming is intended for national audiences and does not reflect the rich diversity of American community life.

Diversity of Viewpoints-Participatory: Local communities must be able to make and air media that reflects local experiences. Our society is founded on a belief in freedom of expression and free speech.

Promote Dialogue and Discussion: Democracy works best when a wide array of voices and opinions can be seen and heard. The airing of opinions creates an opportunity for dialogue around issues and concerns that people and the community must address.

Media Literacy: A basic tenant of civil society is that the lives of all members of the community are important, and all members of society should be able to represent themselves in the media. In order to represent themselves they need access to the electronic media tools to create content, the training to use the tools, and the mechanism(s) to distribute community content.

Non-commercial: PEG access is an essential component in our public media ‘greenspace’ where, like a public park, we can reflect on who we are without the interference of commercial values.

Civic Engagement:  Many of the decisions that most affect our lives are made at the local level by city councils, school boards, mayors, and so on. PEG access keeps the public informed about local government elections, about health services, about public housing, and about other important local political and economic development activities.

Education: Public, Educational and Government (PEG) access plays an important role in our educational system. It provides a distribution medium for use by schools, libraries and colleges; and it is especially important for education in low income and rural communities.

Public Safety: In many areas PEG access channels provide for emergency information and community alerts.

Electronic Greenspace: All communication service providers using the public right-of-way or public airwaves should provide bandwidth and funding for PEG access.

You may download these Core Values of PEG Access as a pdf document from our Resources page.