Free Press

Tim Wu, chair of the board, is a professor of law at Columbia University, where he specializes in telecommunications law, copyright and international trade. He is the co-author of Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford U. Press, 2006) and a regular contributor to Slate magazine. He previously worked at Riverstone Networks in Silicon Valley and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc) and Harvard Law School, and has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Stanford Law School. Wu is on the advisory board of Public Knowledge and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Marcy Carsey is a founder with partner Tom Werner of the Carsey Werner Company, the television production company responsible for a litany of successful shows, including The Cobsy Show, Roseanne, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and That 70’s Show. The Carsey Werner team has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as well as Broadcasting and Cable magazine’s Hall of Fame. Its many awards include the Emmy, the Humanitas Prize, the Peabody, the Peoples Choice, the Golden Globe, and the NAACP Image Award. Marcy graduated from the University of New Hampshire and began her show business career as an NBC tour guide.

Olga M. Davidson is a visiting associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies program at Wellesley College, where her teaching focuses on Persian and Arabic languages and literature. Prior to Wellesley, she was chair of the concentration in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and taught in the program for women's studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings and Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry -- both translated into Persian -- and has published numerous academic articles. Besides her academic duties, she serves as chair of the board of the Ilex Foundation.

Susan Douglas is the director of the Ph.D. program in mass communication at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media; Inventing American Broadcasting; and Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, which won the 2000 Sally Hacker Popular Book Prize for the Society for the History of Technology. Her work focuses on the media's role in the social construction of gender, the history of radio and television broadcasting, the intersection between feminist studies and media studies, and the intersection between American studies and cultural studies.

James Counts Early is the director of cultural heritage policy at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Since 1984, he has served in various positions at the Smithsonian Institution, including assistant provost for educational and cultural programs, assistant secretary for education and public service, deputy assistant secretary for public service, and executive assistant to the assistant secretary for public service. Prior to his work with the Smithsonian, Early was a humanist-administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities; producer, writer, radio host and research associate. The main focus of his professional work is on cultural democracy and the development of cultural heritage policy.

Kim Gandy is president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She chairs the NOW Foundation and political action committees and serves as the organization's principal spokeswoman. Gandy oversees NOW's initiatives and campaigns, including the Women-Friendly Workplace campaign, the Campus Action Network, Young Feminist Task Force, Racial Diversity Program, Save the Courts Initiative and Equal Marriage Campaign. She was one of the lead organizers of the 2004 March for Women's Lives and a key organizer of the 1989 and 1992 marches. Her expertise in mass actions ensured that 1.2 million activists made the 2004 march for women's reproductive freedom the largest and most diverse grassroots mobilization in our nation's history.

Van Jones is a civil rights lawyer and environmental activist who is the co-founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a national human rights organization which challenges abuses in the United States criminal justice system. Winner of several leadership awards, Jones sits on the boards of Rainforest Action Network, WITNESSS, Bioneers, the New Apollo project and the Social Venture Network. He is a graduate of Yale Law School.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts and the law of cyberspace. He has earned undergraduate degrees in economics and management from the University of Pennsylvania, a master's in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He is the author of several books, including Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He also chairs the Creative Commons project and serves on the boards of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.

Robert W. McChesney co-founded Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund with Josh Silver and John Nichols in 2002. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author or editor of 12 award-winning books, including Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935; Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy; The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (with Edward S. Herman); Our Media, Not Theirs (with John Nichols); Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times; The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century; Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections and Destroy Democracy (with John Nichols); and, most recently, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. He hosts a weekly program, Media Matters, on WILL-AM radio, the NPR affiliate in Urbana, Illinois.

John Nichols co-founded Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund with Josh Silver and Robert McChesney in 2002. Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent and the editorial page editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. He is the author of Against the Beast, Jews for Buchanan and Dick: The Man Who Is President and co-author, with Robert McChesney, of It's the Media, Stupid, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, and, most recently, Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections and Destroy Democracy.

Free Press Action Fund

Tim Wu, chair of the board, is a professor of law at Columbia University, where he specializes in telecommunications law, copyright and international trade. He is the co-author of Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford U. Press, 2006) and a regular contributor to Slate magazine. He previously worked at Riverstone Networks in Silicon Valley and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc) and Harvard Law School, and has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Stanford Law School. Wu is on the advisory board of Public Knowledge and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Linda Foley is president of the Newspaper Guild/CWA and vice president of the Communications Workers of America. She is the first woman in the 60-year-plus history of the 34,000-member Guild to hold the office. She is secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO's Department for Professional Employees and is on the executive board of the American Arbitration Association. She is also vice president of the International Federation of Journalists. Before joining the union's staff in 1984, Foley was a copy editor and reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader. She is a member of the board of advisors for the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, her alma mater.

Martin Kaplan is director of the Norman Lear Center and research professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment, Media & Politics. He is the principal investigator of a project monitoring television news coverage of political campaigns. He has served as a White House speechwriter; a Washington journalist; a deputy presidential campaign manager; a Disney studio executive; a motion picture and television producer and screenwriter; and a radio host. He is editor of The Harvard Lampoon Centennial Celebration 1876-1973; co-author (with Ernest L. Boyer) of Educating for Survival; and editor of The Monday Morning Imagination, and What Is an Educated Person?

Robert W. McChesney co-founded Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund with Josh Silver and John Nichols in 2002. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author or editor of 12 award-winning books, including Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935; Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy; The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (with Edward S. Herman); Our Media, Not Theirs (with John Nichols); Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times; The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century; Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections and Destroy Democracy (with John Nichols); and, most recently, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. He hosts a weekly program, Media Matters, on WILL-AM radio, the NPR affiliate in Urbana, Illinois.

John Nichols co-founded Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund with Josh Silver and Robert McChesney in 2002. Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent and the editorial page editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. He is the author of Against the Beast, Jews for Buchanan and Dick: The Man Who Is President and co-author, with Robert McChesney, of It's the Media, Stupid, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, and, most recently, Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections and Destroy Democracy.

Josh Silver co-founded Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund with Robert McChesney and John Nichols. He is the executive director of Free Press and president of the board of directors of the Free Press Action Fund. He overseas all programs, campaigns, fundraising and special projects. Josh previously served as campaign manager for the successful statewide ballot initiative for public funding of elections in Arizona and as the director of development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He has served as the director of an international youth exchange program and as a development and management consultant. Josh publishes frequently on media, campaign finance and other public policy issues. He attended the University of Grenoble, France, and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.