Peter Musurlian has spent 40 years working in every facet of American journalism: print, television, radio, local government public information and military public affairs.
Since 2022, Musurlian has anchored the Federal Newscast, with portions originating as early-morning, 90-second news briefs every weekday during the Federal Drive with Tom Temin interview program. He also assists in booking guests and editing audio tape for Temin’s decades-long marque program.
Musurlian started his journalism career in 1978 as a sportswriter at North Torrance High School in California, where he was a three-sport letterman and 1979 Senior Class President. He also published, on a mimeograph machine, a subversive underground newspaper called The Saxon Underground Chronicles of Knowledge.
Musurlian attended El Camino Community College, where he was editor-in-chief of the Warwhoop, the since-renamed weekly campus newspaper. That leadership role helped secure his acceptance to the University of Southern California, where he double majored in broadcast journalism and political science.
During his undergraduate years, Musurlian landed journalism internships at KABC-TV in Los Angeles and ABC News in Washington, D.C.
In the 1980s, Musurlian worked as a television news reporter at KFBB-TV in Montana, KWTX-TV in Texas, and at the now-defunct Sun World Satellite News in Washington, D.C. He also produced “John McLaughlin’s One on One” in the nation’s capital, a show seen on more than 100 PBS stations across America.
For most of the 1990s, he worked in the Pasadena, California district office of Congressman Carlos Moorhead, eventually serving as the district director.
Following Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Musurlian enlisted as a Spec-4 in the U.S. Army Reserve with the MOS of 46R: public affairs broadcast specialist. He attended the Defense Information School (DINFOS) at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, he received the Humanitarian Service Medal for public-affairs-related work at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Additionally, during U.S. Army annual-training exercises, from 1992 to 1996, he produced television stories from Arizona, California, Texas, Virginia and Panama.
When Congressman Moorhead retired, Musurlian was activated and headed to Central Europe for eight months, where he produced, shot, wrote, narrated and edited news stories for United States Army newscasts, seen throughout Europe. He reported primarily from Hungary, but also filed reports from Croatia and Bosnia and was awarded an Army Commendation Medal and the NATO Medal.
Musurlian’s California-based volunteer work included stints on the boards of the Glendale Heart Association, the Glendale-Crescenta Valley Red Cross, the Armenian National Committee Western Region, and the Burbank Community YMCA. He has also spent substantial time volunteering on campaigns for school board, city council and congress in Los Angeles County, Las Vegas and Indiana.
In 2005, Musurlian formed a documentary production company called Globalist Films, which is still creating video content for television and the internet. The company motto is, “The Intersection of Journalism and the Human Condition.” Film shoots have taken Musurlian from Africa to Auschwitz and Armenia to Anatolia, racking up visits to more than 20 states and 17 countries.
Musurlian has won three Los Angeles Area Emmys, two of which were for the documentaries: “Burbank’s African Sister City,” in 2012, which showcased the history, successes and challenges in Gaborone, Botswana; and “Holocaust Soliloquy,” in 2019, where viewers saw Hungarian Holocaust Survivor Peter Fischl return to the country of his birth, to visit the basement he hid in to evade the Nazis.
Two other documentaries of note that played as a PBS doubleheader on KLCS in Los Angeles in April 2015 were “The 100-Year-Old Survivor,” about a centenarian who lived through the 1915 Armenian Genocide, and “Historic Armenia,” in which Musurlian captured a lost-and-ruined ancient homeland that is now in Eastern Turkey.
In 2006, Musurlian travelled with Tennessee Titans defensive lineman Rien Long, accompanied by his mother and grandmother, to their ancestral homeland of Armenia. Included in that trip was a stop in Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous region that, in 2023, was ethically cleansed of its 120,000 Armenian residents. That film, “The Long Journey from the NFL to Armenia,” also aired on KLCS-TV.
Overall, Musurlian has garnered 10 Los Angeles Area Emmy nominations, as well as 24 Golden Mikes, awarded by the Radio & Television News Association of Southern California. He has also been nominated 10 times for his documentary work by the Los Angeles Press Club, which recognizes journalistic excellence in the second largest media market in the USA.
Before arriving at Federal News Network in 2019, Musurlian spent two decades as the Station Manager and Senior Producer at The Burbank Channel, where, among other things, he produced, shot, wrote, anchored and edited more than 60 editions of Burbank Magazine, an Emmy-nominated quarterly public affairs program.
In addition to his USC Trojan credentials, Musurlian has three graduate degrees: a master’s degree in political science from Baylor University, a master’s degree in journalism and public affairs from American University, and a master’s degree in management from the University of Redlands.
Musurlian has been married since 1998 and has one child, a daughter majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University.
