RICHARD COTTON
Richard Cotton was appointed President and Managing Director, CNBC Europe, in November 2000. Broadcast from London, CNBC Europe currently reaches some 70 million households across the continent. Cotton is responsible for all aspects of the channel’s operations and for carrying out the network’s strategic initiatives, which include increasing its distribution, expanding locally produced European programming, extending live coverage from the leading European financial centers, and developing additional local-language affiliates to add to its Italian and Turkish CNBC services.
Prior to this appointment, Cotton served as executive vice president and general counsel of NBC, a position he held for eleven years. He supervised NBC’s Law Department, which provides legal advice to all NBC business units, and the network’s Washington office, which is responsible for NBC’s regulatory and legislative agenda at the FCC and in Congress.
As NBC’s general counsel, Cotton led the company’s successful efforts in urging the repeal of the financial-interest and syndication rules and the primetime access rule. He supervised NBC’s participation in the debates leading to the 1996 rewriting of telecommunications laws and in the FCC’s reviews of various broadcast regulations during the 1990s.
From 1987 to 1989, Cotton was the president and chief executive officer of Washington-based management company HCX Inc. From 1980 to 1986, he was in private practice, specializing in health and environmental regulation, First Amendment and libel issues, and litigation in federal and state courts at the trial and appellate levels.
He was appointed the deputy executive secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare under Secretary Joseph A. Califano in 1977 and was named the executive secretary in 1978. In 1980, he became the special counsel to Deputy Secretary John Sawhill of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Cotton served as law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1969 to 1970 and to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1971.
After completing his undergraduate degree in 1965 at Harvard, Cotton joined Newsweek magazine as a correspondent in the Chicago bureau. In 1969, he graduated cum laude from the Yale Law School, where he was the executive editor of the Yale Law Journal. His career includes assignments as special counsel and managing attorney for the Concord office of New Hampshire’s Legal Assistance unit, where he pursued law-reform litigation; and as a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Palo Alto, California. He also taught law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Cotton is married to Jamie Fellner, an associate counsel of Human Rights Watch. They have two children.
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