TV
Fritz Pleitgen died – journalist and WDR director
Fritz Pleitgen at WDR in Cologne (1995). photo
© Roland Scheidemann/dpa
Pleitgen is still remembered by the older generation as a correspondent in Moscow and Washington. He later headed the largest ARD broadcaster for twelve years. Now the respected journalist has died.
The television journalist and former WDR director Fritz Pleitgen is dead. He died in Cologne on Thursday evening at the age of 84, as the WDR announced. In June 2020 he announced through the German Cancer Aid that he had pancreatic cancer. He lived in Bergisch Gladbach until his death.
Pleitgen was considered a symbol of public broadcasting and a guarantor of credible journalism on television. He was an ARD correspondent for a long time, including in Moscow and Washington.
He then worked for his home broadcaster, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), editor-in-chief, radio director and then director for twelve years from 1995 to 2007. During this time he worked, among other things, for the development of the regional studios – the motto was: “We switch to next door”. “I didn’t want to become a hierarch at all,” he once assured the German Press Agency. “I always just wanted to be a journalist. But I enjoyed doing the job.”
His last major project was the Capital of Culture Ruhr.2010. Here he was CEO from 2007 to 2011 and as such “the face of the district” in the Capital of Culture year. He was concerned with dismantling outdated ideas of the former “coal pot” and sending new pictures of the Ruhr area around the world. When 21 people died in the Love Parade catastrophe in the year of the Capital of Culture, Pleitgen was one of the few who drove straight to the scene of the accident and publicly admitted a moral responsibility.
ARD chairman Buhrow: Pleitgen was a “clever strategist”
“Fritz Pleitgen stood for courage and fairness, and he loved his WDR,” said today’s WDR director and ARD chairman Tom Buhrow. “But his charisma goes far beyond this station. He stood for public broadcasting and his role in society all his life.” Pleitgen was a “clever strategist who felt fully committed to public service broadcasting and worked energetically and passionately for it”.
Pleitgen leaves behind his wife, three sons and a daughter. His son Frederik tweeted the sentences in English on behalf of the family: “Rest in peace, dad! We have lost a great journalist and the best father imaginable. We are all in great mourning, but we bow before the great life’s work and say thank you for everything you have given us. With eternal love. Pleitgen family.” Frederik Pleitgen is also a television journalist. When he went to Moscow in 2018 as a CNN correspondent, the father admitted: “I envy him that.”