Media executive helped set up public broadcasting network
WardB. Chamberlin Jr., a public broadcasting mandarin who helped set up the network in its infancy, personally led major stations in New York andWashington, and played a critical role in kick-starting the career of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, died Feb. 23 at a retirement community in Bedford, Mass. Hewas 95.
The cause was complications from dementia, said a daughter, Carolyn Chamberlin. He was a longtime resident ofWestport, Mass.
An Ivy League-educated corporatelawyer, Chamberlin was in his late 40s when he swerved by chance into a career as a media executive. He had spent years as the right-hand man in executive suites to Frank Pace Jr., a former U.S. budget director, Army secretary and Democratic Party stalwart.
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Pace board chairman of the nascent Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He knew nothing of the medium of television, so he tapped Chamberlin, who was also his squash and backgammon partner, to investigate.
Chamberlin spoke with a friend in the industry and reported back, according to a Princeton alumni publication, “Frank, you’d better take this job or we’re not going to be friends. This is going to be a lot of fun.”
It was also a lot of work, but over the next several years, Chamberlin was given free rein to take an enormous and ill-defined mandate and shape it into a concrete reality. AsPace’s deputy, he had the authority and the organizational skills to arrange the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ’s budgetary, personnel and programming distribution structure.
He said his most important endeavor was persuading all the station heads, from the most powerful to the smallest, to agree to a decentralized structure in which each licensee had autonomy.
Over the next several years, he served as executive vice president of public broadcasting’s WNET in New York and senior vice president of the Public Broadcasting Service. In 1975, he became president and chief executive of WETA, the struggling Washington-area public radio and television station.
Sharon Percy Rockefeller, his successor, said WETA was a “tiny afterthought” in the constellation of public broadcasting at the time, approaching bankruptcy, suffering from weak leadership and organization and offering scant original programming despite its prime location in aworld capital.
Over the next 14 years, Rockefeller said in an interview, Chamberlin “took us from that fragility to a position of strength,” making WETA the third-largest producer of original shows for PBS, behindWNETand WGBH in Boston. Its operating budget rose to $28 million from about $6 million during his tenure. (WETA is now the No. 2 producer, afterWGBH, and its budget is $96 million, according to Rockefeller.)