Stuart Brotman, the president of the Museum of Television and Radio, has resigned only 15 months after being hired to replace the late Robert M. Batscha.
Only two weeks ago the museum, which operates spectacular exhibition halls in New York City and Los Angeles, hosted its splashy annual dinner in honor of Merv Griffin at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The museum is a nonprofit founded by CBS founder William S. Paley to collect and preserve television and radio programs and advertisements and to make them available to the public. The museum's board of trustees includes the most powerful names in broadcasting and politics including Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Bob Iger, Henry Kissinger, Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda.
Brotman was hired in March 2004 after a year-long search following Batscha's death.
Since 1981 he had run Stuart N. Brotman Communications, a global consulting firm in Lexington, Mass., that provides financial, regulatory policy and operations counseling to telecommunications, Internet and media companies.
He also had held a string of academic posts and seemed a strange fit for a job rubbing elbows with TV and Hollywood glitterati. Brotman was the first HarvardLawSchoolfaculty member to teach telecommunications law and the school's first research fellow in entertainment and media law. Brotman also served as special assistant at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the principal communications policy arm of the White House.
He has written more than 300 articles for scholarly and professional journals and is author or editor of four books, including Communications Law and Practice, a treatise covering telephone "common carrier" and electronic mass media regulation.
When his hiring was announced, Brotman said he intended to expand the museum's programming library to content from other countries and to take advantage of digital technology to make its library more accessible.
