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Patrick Butler is senior vice president of The Washington Post Company with responsibility for public policy new business development and special corporate projects. He is also president of Washington Post Company Productions supervising the production of non-fiction television programming for PBS (including the Best Documentary Emmy-winning Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History) and cable networks. In the early 1990s he chaired PCS Action a consortium of companies (including the Post Company) that helped launch the digital wireless telecommunications industry.
Before joining the Post Company Butler was Washington vice president of Times Mirror where he was a founder of the Times Mirror Center for The People & The Press. From 1982 to 1985 he was president of Patrick Butler and Company a communications consulting firm whose clients included leaders of government business and media.
Previously he had served as staff vice president of RCA Corporation and as director of corporate public relations for Bristol-Myers Company). In government service Butler was a speechwriter for President Gerald R. Ford and special assistant to US Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee.
Butler was legislative director and chairman of the Impeachment Task Force for Congressman Lawrence J. Hogan of Maryland during the Nixon impeachment proceedings in 1974. He was a member of the National Council on the Humanities (1988-1994) and chairman of its Public Programs Committee.
Butler is chairman of the Dean's Advisory Council of the American University School of Communication chairman of the Maryland Public Television Foundation and (as of September 2008) chairman of the corporate advisory board of SOME (So Others Might Eat). He is also a member of the boards of trustees of American University the Foundation for the National Archives the Pew Research Center The Media Institute the University of Tennessee College of Communication and Information the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance the International Research and Exchange Program and the Children's Charities Foundation. He was named a DC-CAPtain for his work in securing enactment of the DC College Access Act under which the federal government pays the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition for District of Columbia students attending colleges nationwide.
Butler began his career in 1966 as a reporter for the Chattanooga News - Free Press and then as City Hall reporter for The Chattanooga Post. He later served as assistant director of public information for the Appalachian Regional Commission and as press secretary and environmental policy advisor to Congressman Wilmer Vinegar Bend Mizell of North Carolina.
Butler majored in political science at the University of Tennessee. He earned a Master of Arts degree (with distinction) in journalism and public affairs at American University where he has taught graduate courses on The Press and Politics and on 21st Century Journalism. He studied finance and accounting at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and he has been accepted as a Fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. | 