Ward Chamberlin Jr., Who Created The U.S. Public Television System As We Know It, Dead At 95

It would be enough that he steered two of the country’s key public stations away from looming financial ruin, or that he’s the executive who made the young Ken Burns’s career possible. But Chamberlin, as founding chief operating officer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, actually ceded a huge piece of his own power by insisting that each individual public television station operate autonomously, independent of the PBS network.