This vile little twerp won himself a place on my avoid-list after he ruined what could have been a perfectly good video anthology of Major League Baseball when he couldn't restrain himself from constant moralizing.
He won a place on MY avoid-list for his History of Jazz series, in which he fell for the stupid old-school definition of jazz as expressed by Wynton Marsalis, whom Burns bought-into as the end-all and be-all of "real" jazz authorities. What a wanker.
Louis Armstrong defined jazz as strictly Dixieland -- Louis thought that Bird and Coltrane and straight-ahead jazz and hard bebop wasn't jazz at all -- just like asshat Wynton thinks electric-fusion jazz ala Eddie Harris, Pat Metheny, Miles Davis (in his later years) and Steps Ahead (Brecker Bros./Michael's Brecker's supreme work on the Electronic Wind Instrument, or EWI, etc.) isn't jazz at all because the instruments are electronic and there is a touch of rock cross-over in the mix. The Old School wankers like Wynton have DECLARED IT SO, and Ken Burns made them the end-all and be-all of authoritative figures.
So interesting, good, adventurous electric jazz, a fusion of jazz forms and rock, is all but DEAD in American radio, and taken over by bland, insulting, but palatable Metamucil "smooth jazz" because stubborn old farts like Marsalis their old-school narrow-minded crap of insisting that it's either Straight Ahead Bop or Nothing at All.
And Ken Burns VALIDATED that, thereby enabling the languishing of a truly great and genuinely AMERICAN music form. Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis can both go jump in the lake, the big phony-baloney racists.