Wolf Blitzer Biography
Wolf Blitzer is an American journalist, television news anchor, and author who has worked for CNN since 1990 and is currently one of the network’s main anchors. He co-hosts The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and was the network’s lead political anchor until 2021.
Wolf Blitzer Age
Blitzer is 73 years old as of 2021. He was born Wolf Isaac Blitzer on 22 March 1948 in Augsburg, Germany.
Wolf Blitzer Height
Blitzer stands at a height of 5 feet 10 inches (1.78m).
Wolf Blitzer Family
Blitzer was born to Cesia Blitzer (née Zylberfuden), a homemaker, and David Blitzer, a home constructor. His parents were Polish Jewish exiles from German-occupied Poland who managed to escape Auschwitz; his father’s grandparents, two uncles, and two aunts all perished there. The 1948 Displaced Persons Act allowed Blitzer and his family to immigrate to the United States.
Wolf Blitzer Education
Blitzer attended Kenmore West Senior High School in Buffalo, New York, and graduated with honors. In 1970, he graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a Bachelor of Arts in history. He was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi at the time. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies with a Master of Arts in International Relations in 1972. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while at Johns Hopkins, where he learned Hebrew.
Wolf Blitzer Wife
Blitzer is married to Lynn Greenfield. The couple married in 1973.
Wolf Blitzer Daughter
Blitzer has a daughter named Ilana Blitzer, who was born in 1981. In New York, she works as a beauty director for Health magazine and All You Magazine. On June 14, 2015, she married David Sinder.
Wolf and his daughter are very close, and when he saw his daughter in her wedding gown, he was overjoyed. Wolf became a proud grandfather on August 15, 2016, when his daughter gave birth to her son Ruben Daniel Sinder. With a shot of the Wolf embracing his young grandchild, CNN broke the news to the rest of the globe.
Wolf Blitzer Career
He moderated many Democratic presidential town halls throughout the 2020 election season, as well as CNN’s January debate in Iowa. Blitzer also hosted special election night coverage in America for the 2020 election, which lasted several days until CNN was the first to project Joe Biden as the winner, and Blitzer was the one to declare it. He’s also been a key part of the network’s increased coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, anchoring seven days a week during the pandemic’s peak in 2020.
Blitzer moderated the CNN Republican Presidential Primary Debates in Las Vegas, Nevada and Houston, Texas in 2016, as well as the CNN Democratic Presidential Primary Debate in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout America’s Choice 2012, Blitzer was a crucial part of CNN’s election coverage, acting as the lead anchor on important primary nights, caucus nights, and the Emmy-winning election night. He hosted three Republican presidential debates on CNN, including the first-ever tea party debate. Blitzer was the driving force behind CNN’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of the presidential primary debates and campaigns in 2008. He was also the executive producer of CNN’s Emmy-winning “America Votes 2006” and “America Votes 2004” programming. He also served as the anchor for the network’s coverage of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s inaugurations.
Blitzer is noted for his in-depth reporting on worldwide events, in addition to politics. In January 2013, Blitzer traveled to Cairo, Egypt, to meet with President Mohamed Morsy in the presidential palace. He was allowed rare entry to North Korea in December 2010 alongside former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. As the sole network journalist in the country, he brought viewers inside the communist, totalitarian dictatorship with broadcasts from Pyongyang’s rarely seen streets and Kim II-sung University.
Blitzer, who is known for his Middle East experience, reported from Israel during the summer of 2006 during the country’s conflict with Hezbollah, and he returned to the region in 2012 with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. In 2005, Blitzer was the only American news anchor on the ground in the United Arab Emirates to cover the Dubai Ports World story. In 2005, he flew to the Middle East to cover the second anniversary of the Iraq war. Blitzer covered the Iraq conflict from the Persian Gulf region in 2003.
Blitzer started his career in Tel Aviv with the Reuters News Agency in 1972. Shortly after, he joined The Jerusalem Post as a Washington, D.C. correspondent, where he spent more than 15 years reporting from the nation’s capital. Blitzer has been with CNN for over 30 years, starting as a military-affairs journalist at the Pentagon in 1990. From November 1992 to 1999, he was CNN’s senior White House correspondent, covering President Bill Clinton. In 1999, he became the anchor of CNN’s Sunday public affairs show Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, where he stayed for more than a decade.
Blitzer has covered a wide range of big breaking news from throughout the world that has affected the worldwide political landscape over the years. Blitzer was in Beirut in 1982 during the PLO and Syrian forces’ evacuation. In 1977, Blitzer covered the first Israeli-Egyptian peace conference in Egypt, and in 1979, he traveled to Egypt and Israel with then-President Jimmy Carter for the final round of discussions that concluded in the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. He was one of the first Western journalists to be invited into KGB headquarters for a rare view inside the Soviet intelligence establishment, and he returned to Moscow in December 1991 to cover the Soviet Union’s demise and the transfer from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin.
Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford are among the people Blitzer has interviewed during the course of his career. Many foreign leaders, including the Dalai Lama, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and former South African President Nelson Mandela, have been interviewed by Blitzer.
Blitzer got the American News Women’s Club Excellence in Journalism Award in 2019 as part of a long list of awards for his reporting. The National Press Foundation honored him with the Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism in March 2014. In 2013, he was named the eighth recipient of the Italian Embassy’s Urbino Press Award for excellence in journalism. In 2011, Blitzer earned The Radio & Television Digital News Foundation’s Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award, as well as The Panetta Institute for Public Policy’s Jefferson-Lincoln Award.
Blitzer was part of the CNN crew that won an Emmy in 2012 for the network’s coverage of Egypt’s revolution, which included Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. He was also crucial to the network’s efforts to win an Emmy for live coverage of Election Day in 2006. He also received the Respect for Law Alliance’s Journalist Pillar of Justice Award in 2004 and the Chicago Press Veterans Association’s Daniel Pearl Award in 2003.
He was also part of teams that received a George Foster Peabody Award for Hurricane Katrina coverage, an Alfred I. duPont Award for coverage of the Southeast Asian tsunami tragedy, and an Edward R. Murrow Award for CNN’s coverage of the terrorist events on September 11, 2001. In addition, for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1996, Blitzer received an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, as well as a Golden CableACE from the National Academy of Cable Programming for his and CNN’s coverage of the Persian Gulf War.
Wolf Blitzer Book
Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter’s Notebook (Oxford University Press, 1985) and Territory of Lies (Harper and Row, 1989), which was named one of the best books of 1989 by The New York Times Book Review.
Wolf Blitzer CNN Salary
Blitzer earns an annual salary of $5 Million.
Wolf Blitzer Net Worth
Blitzer has an estimated net worth of $20 Million.
Other anchors include Forrest Sawyer, Joan Lunden, Jim Avila, Joan Lunden, Cecily Tynan, Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Michael Strahan, Lara Spencer, Ginger Zee, David Muir, Amy Robach, Kendis Gibson, Diane Macedo, Rob Nelson, Paula Faris, and Reena Ninan.
