America needs to know who Barre Seid is, what kind of country he wants and just how massive an impact a gift of that size can have on our political discourse.
How Bob Chitester Made Free To Choose An International Phenomenon thefederalist.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thefederalist.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Bob Chitester: The man who explained capitalism to the world Rainer Zitelmann
Bob Chitester, 83, died after a seven-year battle with cancer. A Wall Street Journal article described Bob Chitester as “the man who made Milton Friedman a star.” And it was right.
Yes, Nobel laureate Friedman would in any case have become one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. But without Chitester, he and his ideas would never have reached anywhere near as many people as they did. Friedman himself said, “I have always believed that influence is exerted much more by the written word .… My own role was persuading economists, not the public at large.” In this respect, Friedman was like most scientists, with the exception of physicists such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, who were geniuses at both science and self-marketing.
Bob Chitester, RIP SHARE
Bob Chitester was managing a small public television station in Erie, PA, when he got the big idea to persuade Nobel laureate Milton Friedman to write and narrate a 10‐part series on free markets for PBS. As unlikely as that prospect was, Bob made it happen. “Free to Choose” was broadcast on PBS beginning in January of 1980, and it made quite a splash just as Reagan and Thatcher were also starting to change the way people thought about markets and government. Milton and Rose Friedman wrote a book to accompany the series. But television helped take Friedman’s ideas from the pages of books to millions more people, and in the process Chitester made Friedman a bigger celebrity and a bigger influence than a mere Nobel Prize could accomplish.
Provided by GlobeNewswire
May 10, 2021 4:04 PM UTC
ERIE, Pa., May 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) Free To Choose Network, a global media company, confirmed today that Founder and Executive Chairman Bob Chitester, 83, passed away, after a seven-year battle with cancer.
“Far exceeding medical predictions, Bob Chitester, founder and chairman of Free To Choose Network, passed away on May 8, 2021 after a seven-year battle with cancer,” said Rob Chatfield, President and CEO of Free To Choose Network. “His profound legacy will carry on, but our friend and teacher will be greatly missed.”
Chitester is best known for producing the 10-part, award-winning PBS series and international best-seller book, Free To Choose, with Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. The series, which reached around 15 million initial viewers, and book changed the world by introducing Friedman’s free-market principles of personal, economic and political freedom. Former Soviet countries used th