Sam Roberts

Ward Chamberlin Jr., a leading architect of the nation’s public broadcasting system who revitalized PBS stations in New York and Washington and nurtured the career of the documentarian Ken Burns, died in Bedford (MA). He was 95.

Chamberlin’s four-decade television career began circuitously. A corporate lawyer at the time, he was working for the nonprofit International Executive Service Corps, where Frank Pace, a former Army secretary, was the president. When Pace was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to be the first chairman of the newly minted Corporation for Public Broadcasting early in 1968, he recruited Chamberlin to join him as chief operating officer. Pace promptly asked Chamberlin to determine what challenges and opportunities public broadcasting presented and gave him the latitude to meet them. Chamberlin proceeded to pioneer an enduring decentralized network model of independent public stations. He remained chief operating officer until he retired in 2003. He was also senior vice president of the Public Broadcasting Service, executive vice president and managing director of WNET in New York and president of WETA in Washington, which he transformed into the third most prolific producer of original programming after WNET and WGBH in Boston.

Gwen Ifill, a groundbreaking journalist who covered the White House, Congress and national campaigns during three decades for The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC and, most prominently, PBS, died at a hospice in Washington. She was 61.

In a distinguished career, Ms. Ifill was in the forefront of a journalism vanguard as a black woman in a field dominated by white men. She achieved her highest visibility most recently, as the moderator and managing editor of the public affairs program “Washington Week” on PBS and the co-anchor and co-managing editor, with Judy Woodruff, of “NewsHour,” competing with the major broadcast and cable networks for the nightly news viewership. They were the first all-female anchor team on network nightly news. She and Ms. Woodruff were the moderators of a Democratic primary debate between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, reprising a role that Ms. Ifill had performed solo between sparring vice-presidential candidates in the 2004 and 2008 general election campaigns. She also wrote “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” a book published the day President Obama was inaugurated in 2009.

Robert Rosencrans, a daring cable television industry pioneer who was instrumental in creating C-Span, the unfiltered public affairs network that faithfully covers government proceedings and civic events, in Greenwich (CT). He was 89.

“There probably wouldn’t be a C-Span without him,” Brian Lamb, the network’s founder and executive chairman, said. C-Span, a private, nonprofit, industry-financed service, began as the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network in 1979, at a time when fewer than one in five homes was wired for cable. Today it comprises several television and radio channels and a web presence, offering a variety of gavel-to-gavel coverage of Congress, presidential campaign events and other public affairs programming, including lectures and forums, book reviews, viewer call-in programs and interviews. After Lamb pitched the concept to cable operators, Rosencrans wrote a $25,000 check on the spot and persuaded other industry executives to pony up $450,000 in seed money to start the network. He became C-Span’s founding chairman.

Rosencrans, joined by equally audacious engineers, investors and programmers, perceived that cable’s potential was in exclusive programming, not merely serving viewers in sparsely populated areas beyond the reach of broadcasters.

William Gaines, an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who shared two Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption in Chicago and was a finalist for a third, died on July 20 in Munster (IN) He was 82. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Michelle Gaines, said.

Gaines, who joined The Tribune in 1963 and uncovered malfeasance for most of his tenure, until he retired in 2001, won his first Pulitzer in 1976 for local investigative specialized reporting on a newspaper team that exposed mortgage abuse in federal housing programs and horrific conditions at two private hospitals — including one where, while working undercover as a janitor, he was enlisted to assist during surgery. “The experience was frightening to me; it was depressing,” he wrote in a Tribune column in 1975, “for I knew that it was not just a fluke that I, a janitor, had been called on to do the work of trained orderlies and nurses’ aides.” He shared his second Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, with Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times, and Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognized a series of articles that uncovered waste and self-dealing in the Chicago City Council. The Pulitzer board called the series “a model of municipal reporting.”