A fixture of broadcast journalism for greater than 4 many years, Ms. Rieger gained native Emmy Awards, together with one for a report on Vietnam 20 years after the conflict. She made news herself when she had open-heart surgical procedure in fall 2020 to handle a fast heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and a defect in a mitral valve. In May 2021, she was identified with a mind tumor and had most of it surgically eliminated, and she or he retired in December after 33 years at WRC.
Ms. Rieger was an actress in Norfolk when she made her journalism debut in the late Nineteen Seventies, incomes more money as a newsreader for a Tidewater-area radio station. She was suggested by a station colleague to “sound” like a newsperson — “You know, serious,” she was instructed. “Like Walter Cronkite.”
After assessing her less-than-flourishing stage profession — “There’s no closer way to get to Broadway than to do dinner theater in Norfolk,” she joked — she modified paths. Ms. Rieger spent a lot of the Eighties in public and industrial radio, with stints at WAMU, WLTT-FM and WTOP, and earned approval for her partaking persona and considerate dealing with of exhausting news and neighborhood options.
She additionally labored as a weekend reporter at CNN’s Washington bureau and, in 1988, joined WRC as a nighttime road reporter throughout the crack epidemic. She started anchoring weekend night newscasts in 1996 and moved to the 5 p.m. weekday slot in 2001, sharing the desk initially with Susan Kidd and later with Jim Handly.
Four years later, Ms. Rieger reported on a girl who had found she was allergic to chemical compounds in her home and located environmentally pleasant methods to treatment the issue. The episode led Ms. Rieger to launch a weekly section and accompanying weblog referred to as Going Green.
“It’s easy to change a couple of things — change a few lightbulbs, wash clothes in cold water,” she instructed Washingtonian in 2008, when the journal awarded her a prize for her dedication to environmental security and preservation. “We want people to do this joyfully.”
Going Green, with tutorials on methods to avoid wasting power and decide to more healthy life for folks and pets, proved so widespread that many stations in the NBC community started airing her segments, and NBC’s “Nightly News” launched the same characteristic.
On the air, Ms. Rieger was inclined to indicate a personally revealing, self-deprecating facet when the temper felt proper. Lashed by wind and rain whereas overlaying a hurricane, she quipped to the viewers, “Note to self: waterproof mascara!” She adopted along with her remark after that maelstrom had tempered down and was solely producing tiny waves in the Atlantic Ocean: The wondrous storm “goes all flat,” she stated, “kind of like my dating life.”
Wendy Bell Rieger was born in Norfolk on April 18, 1956. Her father was an airline pilot, and her mom was an English instructor and later a polygraph examiner. Ms. Rieger was 8 once they divorced.
She graduated from American University in 1980 with a bachelor’s diploma in journalism. Her first marriage, to Sol Levine, a CNN producer, ended in divorce. In 2021 she married retired WRC news photographer Dan Buckley. In addition to her husband, survivors embody three brothers.
As a flaxen-haired former actress, Ms. Rieger typically appeared on lists of Washington’s most engaging native celebrities. She grew weary of the flattery as her profession progressed, saying she wished to maintain consideration on her work. She was happy with having discovered a private fashion of delivering the news, which The Washington Post as soon as described as “self-effacing, opinionated and humorous by turns.”
She referred to as it merely a mirrored image of herself.
“You have to be yourself on the air, you can’t go in there and project some fake personality, some front and expect people to believe it,” she stated. “Eventually the real you comes through and it better be comfortable for you, since that’s what people see on the other side of the camera.”
