Frederik Pleitgen German Journalist From Cologne

Early life

Frederik Pleitgen, often called Fred, is a German journalist who was born in Cologne in 1976. He is the son of Fritz Pleitgen, a journalist who also served as director of the public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Part of his schooling took place at the German International School in Washington, D.C.

For university he studied North American studies at the University of Bonn and the Free University of Berlin, and then spent a year at the School of Journalism at New York University. Two fellowships followed. In 2004 he took part in a program at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in California, and in 2005 he received an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, which he spent at the International Center for Journalists in Atlanta.

Career

From 2000 Pleitgen worked for German broadcasters, including ZDF, RTL and the news channel n-tv. In 2006 he moved to CNN. His reporting for the network has taken him to Iraq, to Pakistan in October 2010, to Egypt during the 2011 revolution and to the civil wars in Libya and Syria. He has also stood in for Christiane Amanpour as host of her CNN programme, and in Paris he covered the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack.

Between May 2013 and December 2014 he returned to RTL as a late-evening co-anchor, while still working as an international correspondent for CNN in Germany. During that period he followed the German team at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. After leaving RTL in February 2015 he became a full-time Senior International Correspondent for CNN International, based in London. In 2026 he reported from Iran during the war there.

Outside news reporting, Pleitgen has one screen acting credit. He appears as a CNN reporter in the 2015 film The Martian, billed twenty-first in the cast. Because of that single part he is listed as both a journalist and an actor, although reporting is the work that defines his career.

Recognition

In 2017 Pleitgen received the Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award, for his coverage of crises in the Middle East and Turkey.

Personal life

As of 2023, after periods of living in the United States and London, he is based in Berlin.