Congressman Collin Peterson, the Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, shared his support for rural programming and the Rural Television Content Protection Act on Facebook Thursday.
“Rural America deserves a fair share of broadcasting resources because those broadcasting networks provide farmers, ranchers, and our ag community as a whole with the critical information needed to maintain our rural economy,” Peterson wrote in a post. “I recently cosponsored H.R. 2682, the Agricultural News and Rural Television Content Protection Act, which will reserve 1 percent of broadcasting bandwidth for rural and agricultural programming.”
The goal of H.R. 2682 is to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require multichannel video programming distributors to carry rural video programming, and for other purposes. The bill states, “a multichannel video programming distributor with 5,000 or more subscribers shall use at least 1 percent of the channel capacity of such distributor to transmit or distribute to all of the subscribers of such distributor channels of video programming that predominantly serve the needs and interests of rural America.”
Peterson has served the 7th district in Minnesota since 1990. His district covers a majority of the Western part of the state and covers many rural counties. As Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, he has jurisdiction over the Farm Bill, renewable energy, disaster assistance, nutrition, crop insurance, conservation, rural development, international trade, futures market regulation, animal and plant health, agricultural research, bioterrorism, forestry, and others.
You can find contact information to urge your Congressman to support the bill here.