Tony Burman (born 13 June 1948) is a Canadian broadcaster, journalist and university official. Starting in the 1960s, Burman has worked as a journalist, in print, radio, television, and online. For most of this time (35 years), he was at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Later he joined Al Jazeera English. He is also active in supporting public broadcasting and investigative journalism. From 2002 to 2007, he was the editor in chief of CBC News. He also served as managing director of the Al Jazeera English network, based in Doha, Qatar, from 2008 to 2010. Burman served as Al Jazeera's chief strategic advisor for the Americas, 2010–2011, based in Washington DC. Starting in 2011, Burman served as the Velma Rogers Graham Research Chair at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In October 2007, Burman received the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's Gordon Sinclair Award for lifetime achievement in broadcast journalism. In October 2009, Arabian Business magazine named him the second most influential non-Arab in the Arab world. Then, in November 2009, the Canadian Expat Association also announced that he had been voted the third most influential Canadian living abroad, behind Michael J. Fox and Wayne Gretzky. Career As a student in the 1960s, Burman edited two school newspapers at Concordia University), one of which was the Loyola News (now The Concordian (Montreal)). In that role, most notably, he was called upon by the Canadian University Press to investigate the circumstances surrounding the resignations of the editors of the University of Windsor's student paper, the Lance, who had reprinted a controversial essay comparing the status of students at California State University and the status of African Americans in society. His commission concluded the university administration had interfered with the independence of the newspaper and forced the editors out: "the concept of freedom of the press at Windsor is very much in doubt." His arguments in the official report, filed at the CUP office in Ottawa, later became encapsulated as the exemplar case in defending the underground journalism movement; the Canadian counterpart to a larger debate regarding the treatment of a now-classic civil rights essay, The Student as Nigger, as well as other related forms of "challenging" social commentary. Burman's first professional role was as an Education Reporter at his father's newspaper, the Montreal Star, in the late 1960s. He then spent several years as a freelancer, including a stint in South