Wendy Rieger, who co-anchored the popular 5 p.m. newscast on Washington’s NBC station WRC-TV (Channel 4) for more than 30 years, died of brain cancer died on April 16, 2022. She was 65.
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Rieger won a loyal audience with her good-humored and well-crafted reports, at a hospice facility in Montgomery County.
A fixture of broadcast journalism for more than four decades, Ms. Rieger also 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.
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Ms. Rieger was an actress in Norfolk when she made her journalism debut in the late 1970s, earning extra money as a news reader for a Tidewater-area radio station. She was advised by a station colleague to “sound” like a news person — “You know, serious,” she was told. “Like Walter Cronkite.”
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.
She also worked as a weekend reporter at CNN’s Washington bureau and, in 1988, joined WRC-TV as a nighttime street reporter during the crack epidemic.
She began anchoring weekend evening newscasts in 1996 and moved to the 5 p.m. weekday slot in 2001, sharing the table initially with Susan Kidd and later with Jim Handly.
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