Bob Chitester

Bob Chitester (October 30, 1937 – May 8, 2021) was an American Television Executive and Producer, best known for creating the 10-hour, ten-part series starring economist Milton Friedman called Free to Choose.

Bob Chitester was born in 1937 in rural Pennsylvania, son of a lineman named Palmer R. Chitester. Chitester attended the University of Michigan for both his B.A. as well as M.A. degrees in Media, Radio and Television. Chitester created the first public television station in Erie, Pennsylvania in the late 1960s, and called it WQLN for "Question and Learn." In the mid-1970's, Chitester became interested in making a counter series to the program hosted by left-liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, which was called The Age of Uncertainty and first aired in 1977.

Chitester approached recent Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman in 1977 about making a program of this type, and Friedman agreed, with filming beginning c. 1978 and culminating in the production of a 10-hour show titled, Free to Choose which went on to be one of PBS's most watched programs. Free to Choose was accompanied by a best-selling book of 1980 of the same name.

In Chitester's later years, he went on to found the Free To Choose Network (FTCN), and created a high number of programs intended for public television distribution as well as release on platforms such as YouTube.

An article from The Wall Street Journal praised Chitester's work in creating Free to Choose, and in particular in launching economist Milton Friedman to stardom. The Wall Street Journal went further in stating that the influence that the Free to Choose program had on the Reagan administration was immense, as well as the effect the program had on the public-at-large by popularizing capitalism and free market ideas to millions of television viewers well in to the 1980s:

Bob Chitester’s 1980 PBS series ‘Free to Choose’ helped make capitalism popular.

Chitester was known as a lone independent thinker in his beliefs as a General Manager of a Public Television station, "Mr. Chitester was probably the only PBS or NPR station manager who didn’t believe public radio and television should receive subsidies from American taxpayers."

At the age of 83, following a 7-year battle with cancer, Chitester died in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Bob received the Sir Antony Fisher Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016 from Atlas Network.