New York, NY (January 21, 2005) -- New York Law School Professor Michael Botein, a well-respected expert in communications law, is available to offer expert commentary on the four-year tenure of Michael Powell, FCC chairman, who announced his resignation today.

Offering a personal perspective on Powell’s tenure, Botein commented, “Chairman Powell’s watch has been plagued by poor administration, incoherent policy, and failure of consensus. The FCC’s ill-fated attempt to raise the national TV station ownership limitations helped only a few large corporations—which contributed to its downfall in both Congress and the courts. On the telecommunications front, Powell was unable to move the Commission to resolve fundamental questions left by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

“His attack on TV indecency was doctrinally unsound, since it went far beyond 50 years of FCC and judicial precedents—making it a prime target for eventual judicial invalidation,” added Botein.

Michael Botein is a former senior attorney-advisor in the FCC’s Cable Television Bureau, where he drafted and enforced the inaugural cable television regulations. At New York Law School, Botein started the Media Center, the nation’s oldest training programs for media lawyers, home for the study of telecommunications, media, and new media law and policy. Botein has written more than 70 articles and books, among them Regulation of the Electronic Mass Media Law and Policy for Radio, Television, Cable and the New Technologies (West Group, 1999), now in its third edition.

A graduate of Wesleyan University and Cornell Law School, Botein also holds LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from Columbia Law School. He received a Fulbright fellowship in 1991. He is regularly invited to speak at law schools around the world, recently consulting with the University of Bogota, Colombia on establishing a media law program there. He began his career teaching law at age 24, when he became an instructor at Brooklyn Law School, and progressed to appointments at Columbia, George Washington University, Georgetown, and Rutgers. He has also taught overseas at the University of Poitiers in France, the University of Melbourne and Monash University in Australia, and Hebrew University as well as Haifa University in Israel.

Botein can be reached at 973.761.6162 (home), 973.818.7671 (cell), 212.431.2161 (office), or via e-mail at michaelhbotein@aol.com.

For additional assistance, please contact Edith Sachs in the Office of Public Affairs at New York Law School at 212.431.2187 (office), 917.376.6573 (cell), or via e-mail at esachs@nyls.edu.

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