Tyrone Brown to Become President of Media Access Project

WASHINGTON, March 25, 2010 – Lawyer and former Federal Communications Commissioner Tyrone Brown will take over as president of the Media Access Project beginning Apr. 1.

Brown takes over from Andrew Schwartzman, who will continue with MAP as senior vice president and policy director.

Brown came to Washington as a law clerk for the late Chief Justice Earl Warren and served as FCC commissioner during the Carter Administration.

“I plan to concentrate on expanding MAP’s sources of funding and, substantively, on highlighting and combating structural barriers to objective news reporting and on supporting optimal and ubiquitous access to the Internet by all demographics,” said Brown in a statement.

Since leaving government, he has worked on his communications law practice at major DC law firms, including Wiley Rein and Steptoe & Johnson, and on various business ventures.

He co-founded DC’s first cable television system and worked on the relaunch after bankruptcy of Iridium, a global mobile satellite system.

Early in his career, he was an in-house counsel at Post-Newsweek Stations, the broadcast station operations of the Washington Post Co.

Recently, he taught ethics to journalism students at Duke University.