Palmer R. Chitester Fund
Encyclopedia
The Palmer R. Chitester Fund is a defunct libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...

-leaning Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation based in Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie is a city located in northwestern Pennsylvania in the United States. Named for the lake and the Native American tribe that resided along its southern shore, Erie is the state's fourth-largest city , with a population of 102,000...

.

The Fund had three main initiatives:
  • Free To Choose Media, which produces television programs and videos making classical liberal economic and political ideas accessible to a popular audience
  • izzit.org,which produces media for children, sometimes adapting television broadcasts for a school audience

The Palmer R. Chitester Fund was founded by Bob Chitester, using start-up money provided by a number of charitable sources and named in honor of his father. At the time, Bob Chitester was the general manager of two public broadcasters in Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie is a city located in northwestern Pennsylvania in the United States. Named for the lake and the Native American tribe that resided along its southern shore, Erie is the state's fourth-largest city , with a population of 102,000...

: the PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 channel WQLN-TV and the NPR station WQLN-FM
WQLN-FM
WQLN-FM is a National Public Radio member station and serves the Erie, Pennsylvania area. Studios are located in Erie.-Repeaters:WQLN-FM also broadcasts from the following 5 translators:-External links:*...

.

History

The origins of the foundation lay in PBS's broadcast of The Age of Uncertainty (1975), a 13-part BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 series produced by liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith , OC was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism...

. The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a non-profit corporation created by an act of the United States Congress, funded by the United States’ federal government to promote public broadcasting...

 was a classical liberal economist, W. Allen Wallis, who had met Chitester in 1975 when he participated in a symposium on "Technology and Society" arranged by Chitester in Erie and learned that Chitester shared his classical liberal economic views. Wallis and Chitester both believed that PBS should produce a classical liberal response to The Age of Uncertainty. Wallis therefore introduced Chitester to his old friend Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades...

 in early 1977 (shortly after Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, but officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel , is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics, generally regarded as one of the...

). As a result, Chitester produced a 10-part PBS series entitled Free to Choose
Free to Choose
Free to Choose is a book and a ten-part television series broadcast on public television by economists Milton and Rose D...

, which first aired in early 1980. Friedman also co-authored a book with his wife Rose Friedman
Rose Friedman
Rose Director Friedman , also known as Rose D. Friedman and Rose Director was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She was the wife of Milton Friedman , the winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics, and sister of Aaron Director...

 to accompany the television series. This book spent 5 weeks at the top of the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers List in 1980.

It was in the context of producing the Free to Choose series that Chitester first organized Free to Choose Media, which became a part of the Palmer R. Chitester Fund. Free To Choose Media continues to produce media describing classical liberal economic ideas to a mass audience. Chitester and Free To Choose Media produced a documentary detailing the life of Milton Friedman, entitled The Power of Choice, which aired on PBS in 2007. Another Free To Choose Media production, entitled The Ultimate Resource (named after the 1981 book The Ultimate Resource
The Ultimate Resource
The Ultimate Resource is a 1981 book written by Julian Lincoln Simon challenging the notion that humanity was running out of natural resources...

by Julian Lincoln Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon was a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Simon wrote many books and...

) also aired on PBS in 2007. The Ultimate resources has won a number of distinguished awards and continues to run on HDNet.
Beginning in 1999, the Palmer R. Chitester Fund provided funding to ABC News
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...

 reporter John Stossel
John Stossel
John F. Stossel is an American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and libertarian columnist. In October 2009 Stossel left his long time home on ABC News to join the Fox Business Channel and Fox News Channel, both owned and operated by News Corp...

 for his "Stossel in the Classroom" program.

izzit.org

The organization currently known as izzit.org was initially called In the Classroom Media. Izzit.org provides teachers with materials on current events and other topics for in-classroom use. Izzit.org has used celebrities (e.g. Drew Carey
Drew Carey
Drew Allison Carey is an American actor, singer, comedian, photographer, sports executive, and game show host. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and making a name for himself in stand-up comedy, Carey eventually gained popularity starring on his own sitcom, The Drew Carey Show, and serving as...

) in some of its productions.

The Idea Channel no longer markets the documentaries produced by Free To Choose Media. Much of the Palmer R. Chitester Fund archival footage now appears on Youtube.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK