Television Career
Burns began his television career at WQED, the PBS station in Pittsburgh, hosting a cultural affairs program in the studio adjacent to the studio in which Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was produced.
After Pittsburgh, Burns went on to make stops in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where he was an anchorman and news director; and Minneapolis, where he was a reporter and anchorman. His work in Minneapolis caught the attention of NBC News executives in New York, and after a year and a half at station KMSP, Burns was hired as a national correspondent for NBC in 1976. Assigned first to the network's Chicago bureau, he was then moved to New York, with occasional overseas postings in Europe and northern Africa. He appeared regularly on NBC Nightly News and on The Today Show.
In 1984, the Washington Journalism Review (now the American Journalism Review) named Burns one of the top writers in the history of broadcast journalism. Other broadcasters on the list include Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Charles Kuralt. Burns was fired in 2008 after 10 years of hosting Fox News Watch on the Fox News Channel. The New York Times said Burns acted as "the ringmaster for a relatively even-handed roundtable discussion about the media." Vanity Fair magazine once called Fox News Watch one of only two programs on the network worth watching.
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