Macon isn’t giving up on its long-running effort to get cable provider Cox Communications to move three public-access channels back to analog broadcast.

At a town hall meeting Monday in City Hall, about 80 people showed up to hear talk of ways to pressure Cox into restoring the channels and once again carrying local station WPGA-TV.

Until last October, city meetings, educational programs and public access shows appeared on channels 14, 17 and 18, respectively. Known collectively as PEG channels, they were moved off of analog broadcast channels to make way for new high-definition digital programming.

Councilman Tom Ellington said Cox’s choice of replacement channels sends the message that cartoons, home shopping clubs and out-of-town preachers are more important than local politics and education.

This year, the city joined a petition to the Federal Communications Commission seeking to prohibit cable companies from moving those channels off of basic analog. Backed by a number of cities, it’s been under way for more than two years.

A 2009 letter from Cox says WPGA was being dropped since it was no longer an ABC affiliate, but a June 2011 letter from WPGA says it’s becoming an affiliate of the KIN network.