John Beard is an Emmy Award–winning American news anchor based in Buffalo, NY.
Beard hails from St. Pauls, North Carolina and was a Navy Corpsman with the Marines before beginning his broadcast career. He is a graduate of East Carolina University.
From December 1993 until September 2007, he anchored, with Christine Devine, the 10 p.m. newscast at KTTV in Los Angeles. Prior to KTTV, Beard was a longtime anchor at KNBC-TV, beginning a 13 year career at the station in 1980. It was during one of Beard's newscasts at KNBC that an unbalanced viewer came onto the news set and forced consumer advocate David Horowitz to read the man's manifesto at gunpoint. Once Horowitz finished reading the paper, the man set the gun down on the desk, at which time Beard quickly grabbed it.
Beard has also worked at WIVB-TV in Buffalo, and at WITN-TV and WXII-TV in his home state of North Carolina.
Beard has appeared as himself and various similar newscaster roles in a number of television series including Spider-Man, Arrested Development (on which he made sixteen appearances as himself) and 24.
Beard was dropped by KTTV in December 2007. According to his personal website, he was fired (despite the highest ratings in station history) after a long fight to do more substantial news and less celebrity fluff. Beard also left KNBC in 1993 after refusing to read inaccurate news copy and celebrity stories (particularly regarding pop singer Michael Jackson), and took a pay cut to go to KTTV. KNBC management at the time let him out of his contract to go to a "lesser" station, but would not release him to go to KABC or KCBS because they didn't want to compete against him.
Recently Beard announced he was returning to television. He has returned to Buffalo, NY and is now an anchor for Channel 2 News Daybreak and Midday on WGRZ. His signing has helped propel WGRZ's morning newscast, Daybreak, into first place in Buffalo's Nielsen ratings. Beard has expressed interest in renewing his contract in Buffalo when it expires.
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