He joined the Western Daily Press, the Bristol newspaper, as a junior reporter in 1956 and the BBC World Service in 1965. His first job as a radio correspondent took him to Aden and from there he went to Cairo. In 1969 he moved to television, and made his first broadcast in Singapore. 

He had a spell as Ireland correspondent, based in Belfast, at the height of the Troubles, but returned to the role he liked best of foreign correspondent, with spells in cities such as Cairo, Hong Kong, Washington and New York. In August 1977 he was obliged to leave Rhodesia when the white government under Ian Smith objected to Barron’s report on the deaths of 23 people. 

Barron spent some of his most productive years broadcasting from South and East Asia and gave graphic accounts of his experiences at the hands of Chinese security forces after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.  He was reporting from the deck of the US Mobile as the first missile was fired by US forces against Saddam Hussein in the war in Iraq and was later briefly arrested in Basra by Iraqi soldiers.

Barron was appointed MBE in 2007 for services to broadcasting and named the 1979-80 Journalist of the Year by the Royal Television Society.