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Speaks for ARD from 2023: Kai Gniffke
Photo:
Patricia Neligan / SWR
The director of Südwestrundfunk (SWR), Kai Gniffke, will take over the ARD chairmanship in 2023.
The ARD directors and committee chairmen decided on Wednesday according to ARD information in Bremen.
After the resignation of the RBB director Patricia Schlesinger from the ARD chairmanship, who was fired without notice, Gniffke started a year earlier than planned.
After Schlesinger's resignation, Schlesinger's predecessor, Tom Buhrow, from Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) temporarily took over the presidency again.
In this role, he announced an unprecedented distancing of the ARD grandees from their management colleagues at RBB.
Most recently, the previous WDR administrative director Katrin Vernau was elected interim director of the Berlin-Brandenburg institution.
Buhrow congratulated Kai Gniffke and thanked him for agreeing to take up the office of ARD chairman early.
"These are challenging times for ARD that we can only tackle together," said Buhrow.
The people in the country expected public service broadcasting »that we draw consequences from mistakes, act transparently, develop further and offer a contemporary, innovative program for the whole of society.«
Kai Gniffke, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1960, has been in charge of the two-country institute SWR since 2019.
Before moving to Stuttgart, Gniffke was the first editor-in-chief of ARD-Aktuell in Hamburg for many years, responsible for "Tagesschau" and "Tagesthemen".
Gniffke emphasized that ARD belongs to everyone in Germany because it is supported by society as a whole.
That is a great privilege.
"We will make it even clearer that we are independent and committed to journalistic quality," announced Gniffke.
Joint action in the ARD will continue to be crucial in order to offer the best possible program.
"The focus must always be on the needs of the audience," says Gniffke.
feb/dpa