in political science at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and then spent a year at Harvard on a Frank Knox Fellowship, where his teachers included Henry Kissinger and John Kenneth Galbraith.
[3] Heard then moved to the Global Television Network where he served as vice president, news and current affairs, until 1987 when he accepted a position as communications director for Liberal leader John Turner.
In early 2010, a consortium made up of Heard, Jerry Grafstein, Beryl Wajsman and Diane Francis announced a bid, which proved unsuccessful, to purchase the National Post, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette from the floundering CanWest media conglomerate.
[5] Heard is married to the Canadian journalist, Gillian Cosgrove and they have a daughter, Jennifer, a 2010 political science honours graduate from Guelph University, who died aged 28 in Toronto after a seizure on June 12, 2015.
Heard's father George was a popular radical journalist with the Rand Daily Mail in the 1930s and 1940s, who exposed Nazi sympathisers and security breaches in the government-run South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).