WDR director Tom Buhrow has rejected allegations against the “hard but fair” moderator Louis Klamroth because of his relationship with the climate activist Luisa Neubauer. It doesn’t interest him with whom the protagonists of the WDR program “share table and bed,” said Buhrow on Tuesday at a meeting of the broadcasting council in Cologne. Critics had chalked up to Klamroth that he should have informed WDR earlier. Some also questioned his impartiality as a moderator.
Buhrow said he was only interested in whether someone could distinguish between their private beliefs and the obligation to report independently. When he looks at the program that Klamroth moderated on Monday evening on the subject of the climate crisis, he found that he had fully lived up to this professional claim.
TV director Jörg Schönenborn explained that in the spring and early summer of last year there was an intensive selection process in the search for a successor to the long-standing “Hart aber fair” presenter Frank Plasberg. In mid-August, the WDR then announced the decision for Klamroth. At the end of August, Klamroth approached WDR and informed him about his relationship with Luisa Neubauer. Contract talks with him were only concluded at the end of the year. For reasons of transparency, it was important to Klamroth himself to make his previously unknown relationship public. “In consideration, we decided on the most successful presenter of his generation,” said Schönenborn.
