OBITUARIES

Wendy Rieger, longtime Channel 4 anchor in Washington, dies at 65

By Travis M. Andrews
Today at 12:52 p.m. EDT

Wendy Rieger, who co-anchored the popular 5 p.m. newscast on Washington’s NBC station WRC (Channel 4) for more than 30 years, winning a loyal audience with her good-humored and well-crafted reports, died April 16 at a hospice facility in Montgomery County. She was 65. ... The cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.

A fixture of broadcast journalism for more than four decades, Ms. Rieger won local Emmy Awards, including one for a report on Vietnam 20 years after the war. She made news herself when she had open-heart surgery in fall 2020 to address a rapid heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and a defect in a mitral valve. In May 2021, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had most of it surgically removed, and she retired in December after 33 years at WRC.



Ms. Rieger was an actress in Norfolk when she made her journalism debut in the late 1970s, earning extra money as a newsreader for a Tidewater-area radio station. She was advised by a station colleague to “sound” like a newsperson — “You know, serious,” she was told. “Like Walter Cronkite.”

[What Wendy Rieger learned from Washington]

After assessing her less-than-flourishing stage career — “There’s no closer way to get to Broadway than to do dinner theater in Norfolk,” she joked — she changed paths. Ms. Rieger spent much of the 1980s in public and commercial radio, with stints at WAMU, WLTT-FM and WTOP, and earned acclaim for her engaging personality and thoughtful handling of hard news and community features.

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By Travis Andrews
Travis M. Andrews is a features writer for The Washington Post. He is also the author of "Because He's Jeff Goldblum," a rumination on the enigmatic actor's career and an exploration of fame in the 21st century. He joined The Post in 2016. Twitter https://twitter.com/travismandrews