Eric Burns is an American author, playwright, media critic, and former broadcast journalist. Although he has since come to disdain most media to such an extent that he no longer bothers with criticism, refusing all requests for comment on egregious media behavior, weary of the sameness of it.
Burns (born 1945) was born and raised in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, a small steeel town approximately 15 miles northwest of Pittsburgh on the Ohio River. He is a 1963 graduate of Ambridge Area High School and a 1967 graduate of Westminster College, Pennsylvania, where he was one of the few Catholics in an institution dedicated to producing Presbyterian ministers. In neither place did he study history, which would eventually lead to his literary renown.
Instead, Burns devoted himself to basketball in high school and college, making no mark for himself. But he has continued to play all his life, and is now, by both attrition and the universal consent of those with whom he plays at his local YMCA, one of the great 66-year-old participants of his sport in the United States. He hopes to play at a reasonably high level until he reaches 70, at which point, with all muscles aching and all tendons stretched, he will enter a highly assisted living facility.
After graduating from college, Burns timidly embarked on a career as a standup comedian, even performing at Greenwich Village's famed Bitter End on two amateur nights. Woody Allen got his start at the Bitter End. So did Richard Pryor, Dick Cavett, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, among others. Burns did not. He was, by his own definition, "a nervous flop."
So he gave up show business, deciding to get serious and returning to show business in a different, and at that time, respectable forum. He began his television career at the PBS station in Pittsburgh, hosting a cultural affairs program in the studio adjacent to the studio in which Misterogers Neighborhood was produced. He and Fred Rogers became great friends, and Burns describes Rogers as the closest thing to a mentor he has ever had. "You should work for the BBC," Rogers used to tell Burns. In retrospect, Burns says he wishes he had tried.
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 who never ran into Mary Tyler Moore or "Mr. Grant." Despite that, 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.
For his reporting on NBC, the Washington Journalism Review (now the American Journalism Review) named Burns one of the top writers in the history of broadcast journalism. As such, he joined such other luminaries as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Charles Kuralt, among others, in reporting's pantheon. Burns left television news after 10 years of hosting Fox News Watch on the Fox News Channel.[1] His even-handedness as the program's moderator won him praise from both sides of the political spectrum, neither of which could discern Burns's own views. Vanity Fair magazine once called Fox News Watch one of only two programs on the network worth watching.
After leaving the Fox program, Burns turned down several offers to return to television, dismissing his agent and declaring that he had had enough. Since then, he declares proudly, he has not once sat in a makeup room or addressed a TV camera with false bonhomie.
By the time Burns disappeared from the airwaves, he had long since begun to appear on bookshelves, having established himself as a critically acclaimed, academically respected author. To this point has written nine books, two of which won the highest award given by the American Library Association for volumes published by a university press. Named as the "Best of the Best" were The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol, and its companion-piece, The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco. Burns is the only non-academic ever to have won the award twice.
Those two books, and his biggest-seller, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, which was a selection of both the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club, are among five of Burns's book to have been "adopted" by various college curricula for courses in journalism, American history, and American Studies. Infamous Scribblers is considered the definitive work on journalism during the colonial era, our nation's most tumultuous time.
Burns has also written for a number of magazines, including Reader's Digest, Weekly Standard, Family Circle, Spy, and the pre-Ruper Murdoch version of TV Guide. In addition, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Post, and Huffington Post, among other print outlets.
Burns continues to write and, although more books will follow, he has also turned his attention to the theatre. His first play, Mid-Strut, is the story of a middle-aged man who, upon discovering that he has but six months left to live, begins dreaming of the majorette who pranced across the field at halftime of the football games when they were both in high school, making his pulse pound like a big bass drum as she marched so proudly to the stirring accompaniment of John Philip Sousa marches. In 2010, Mid-Strut won first prize in the Eudora Welty Emerging Playwrights Competition. Burns was 64 at the time, surely the oldest "emerger" in the history of the American stage.
The play's "World Premiere" is set for the winter of 2012 at the famed Pittsburgh Playhouse.
Covering the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981, Burns met his wife, Dianne Wildman, also an NBC correspondent at the time. As of 2011, they have been married for 28 years and have two children. Their son is Tobias, a 2006 graduate of Harvard, where his concentration was classics and his passion is singing. Their daughter is Cailin, a 2011 graduate of Johnson and Wales, where her major and passion combined in fashion merchandising.
All four of the Burnses live in the New York metropolitan area and see each other often. The elder Burns and his wife lead private lives, attending no grand openings, no openings nights, no photographed events.
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