Politics

The New CMD: From Grim News to Great News

By John Stauber

The economic recession has been brutal to our Center for Media and Democracy, bringing a drop in individual and foundation funding that forced us to reduce our staff and cut our budget. Despite the stress and turmoil we stayed the course in conducting a national search for my replacement, our next executive director. We simultaneously appealed to past supporters for financial help, and we developed new programs with new supporters. I hoped that by this summer we'd be able to both announce a new executive leader and the turn-around of our economic crisis.

After months of difficulty and with hard work by our board and sacrifice by our staff, I'm elated to report that we have succeeded. An extensive search led by our consultant Susan Egmont has brought us a dynamic new executive director who despite her youth has years of national leadership in both government service and with prominent public interest and civil liberties groups in Washington, DC. We'll introduce her to you soon in early July. At the same time, we've obtained new financial support to launch a major program focused on analyzing the massive new government spending on corporate bailouts, economic stimulus and health care reform.

The health care component will be led in part by a former industry insider who is working with us to examine the role of the powerful insurance industry in undermining, manipulating and thwarting reform.

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Full post as published by PR Watch on June 23, 2009 (boomark / email).