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     How pro-Israel militants tried to destroy career of radio
     talk show host Gene Burns. (Bickelhaupt Boston Globe 11/6/92)
     
<doctype>newspaper article
<author>Bickelhaupt, Susan
<title>Taking a call from New York
<subtitle>Gene Burns heads for the big time
<newspaper>The Boston Globe
<date>November 6, 1992
<pages>33, 35

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     Despite skyrocketing ratings, Burns left WCBM-AM two years
     later, under what he calls "a very big cloud."
     
     The cloud came not from Burns being his usual outspoken self,
     but from alienating advertisers in the process.

     "Well, I told the truth," Burns says.

     Basically, Burns, who had called himself a liberal democrat,
     had misgivings about the war in Vietnam, so the station manager
     suggested he go there to see for himself. He went to Saigon and
     saw in 15 minutes "that it was hopeless, no one was in
     control." He came back and talked about it on the air.

     Burns continued to ride the national political maelstrom the
     following fall, this time when his support for Israel wavered.
     An advertiser thought Burns should again go to the region to
     see for himself, but that just exacerbated matters.
     
     Burns, who toured Jordan and Israel, thought he came back to
     offer a more enlightened view of the conflict. But the advertising 
     community in Baltimore didn't agree.
                                                             
     He was called an anti-Semite, and an Arab propagandist. After
     steaming over the "untrue charges," Burns resigned on the air.
     Some people called "to cancel our friendship," others sent
     telegrams congratulating Burns, and the manager wanted Burns to
     stay on.
     
     He did, but only for a month.
     
     "The calls ran heavily in my favor, but the advertising began
     to slip away," he says. "It was just an unhappy place to work.
     I couldn't talk about the Mideast, and I kept hearing about
     cancellations."
     
     So he quit.
     
     Burns went to Europe for a month, and when he came back his job
     offers had dried up.
     
     "There was a group of people called the 'truth squad' who went
     every place I went, and were right behind me to say, 'He's an
     anti-Semite, you can't hire him.'"
                                                        
     But then came his entrance into Boston radio, when Dan Griffin,
     who was with WEEI-AM at the time, ignored the stories and hired
     him to do and afternoon talk-show shift.
     
     "It was $9,000 less than I'd been making, but I had to work,"
     he says.

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