Few Western journalists know Iran as well as Fred Pleitgen. CNN‘s senior international correspondent has been reporting on the conflicts and contradictions of the Islamic Republic for more than a decade now.
Pleitgen was the first Western journalist into Iran after the Israeli air strikes on June 13 — traveling over the border from Turkey and then some 14 hours by car to Tehran — and while the Israel-Iran war dominated international media coverage, few were as close to the action as Pleitgen, 49, and his team, including long-time producer and photojournalist Claudia Otto. They went inside the wreckage of the building housing the Iranian State Broadcaster, which was hit by an Israeli airstrike while an anchor was live on air; stayed in the country throughout the tit-for-tat missile attacks between Tehran and Tel Aviv; and were there to report on the U.S. missile strikes on Iranian nuclear sites on June 22 (and the street protests, which were organized by the mullahs but apparently with participation from those opposed to the regime). They remained until the June 24 ceasefire.
“When Trump said that the Israelis ‘unloaded the last [missiles] hours before the ceasefire,’ we really felt that on the ground,” Pleitgen, 49, notes. “We had a massive airstrike approximately 700 yards from our building that shook everything in the morning. The night before the ceasefire kicked in, we were on the rooftop and heard and felt the Israeli jets streaking past and hitting places in central Tehran.”
It was classic CNN stuff, the kind of on-the-ground, international crisis reporting that the news network built its brand on. It’s the kind of journalism — expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive — that many fear could fall victim to cost-cutting in the wake of corporate shuffling at CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
WBD’s decision, announced June 9, to split the studio in two, will see CNN, together with TNT Sports, Discovery and other TV and digital products, spun off into a new, publicly-traded company, Global Networks. Gunnar Wiedenfels, WBD’s CFO who’s set to be the president and CEO of Global Networks, confirmed that Global Networks will be saddled with “the majority” of WBD’s $37 billion in debt, making budget cuts likely.
WBD corporate strategy is, obviously, above Pleitgen’s pay grade. But the veteran reporter argues that boots-on-the-ground reporting is not only essential to understanding complex global crises like the Israel-Iran war — it’s also what audiences still turn to CNN for when the world is on fire.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Pleitgen shortly after he returned home to Berlin from Tehran. The ceasefire between Iran and Israel continues to hold, but the future of Iran’s nuclear program, and of Iranian-U.S. relations, remains as fraught as ever.
You’ve been to Iran many, many times in the past. What surprised you about what you found when you arrived this time?
Even when we were going into Tehran, stopping at rest stations and things like that, people were a bit cooler with us than normal. Usually, they are quite jovial and happy to see us, but you could sense there was a degree of anger, after this attack, which came from Israel, of course, but they see it as supported by Western countries and the U.S. …The other thing that I felt when we were driving in was the country didn’t seem destabilized at all. The air strikes were obviously hurting them, but it was still like pin pricks, you know? In the country itself, factories were working, trucks were on the street. You didn’t get a sense that the society was destabilized. It was the same in Tehran as well. Some people were leaving, they were going to the mountains. But it didn’t seem to me there was mass panic or anything.
Did attitudes change as the situation developed, especially after the U.S. airstrikes?
The attitudes changed while the shooting war was going on between Iran and Israel. Even at the end of the first week, on Friday, a lot of people started coming back. They’d sort of gotten used to the situation. And they were quite friendly, actually. After the U.S. strikes, we were at a [demonstration], which was obviously organized by the government but also had a lot of moderate people there, and they were generally okay. There were people speaking their minds angrily, threatening President Trump and all these things. But there was never a moment when anybody became hostile or violent towards us.
What’s your assessment of the impact of the strikes on public sentiment on the streets of Tehran toward the government?
Well, it’s always a question of what we get to see, but we did go around the city a lot and we managed to speak to a lot of folks, some in northern Tehran, which is wealthier, and very westernized, where usually there are a lot of people who don’t support the government and the leadership. But even there was the attitude: ‘Why is the U.S. doing this? If we want change, we’ll do it ourselves.’
A lot of the commentary around the war has been about how this could be a trigger for regime change in Tehran.
Yeah, I didn’t see any of that. There were times in the past three to four years when [the Iranian regime] was on the ropes a little bit, especially when the hijab protests were going on in 2022. But I think, if anything, out of this, they feel strengthened by the fact that people were rallying around the flag. There were no uprisings in any of the regions where you would normally see stuff like that, like Kurdistan, but also in the western border regions in the north. Nothing of that nature. If anything, the government felt that its position was strengthened by this war.
I don’t think that that necessarily says much about people’s attitudes. I think there is still a lot of discontent among a lot of people, but that gets put aside when they get attacked from the outside. I heard the son of the former Shah [U.S.-based opposition figure Reza Pahlavi] coming out and saying he believes this is a Berlin Wall moment. I didn’t see that vibe on the street. People, if they want change, don’t want it induced from the outside by the U.S. or Israel.
What do you think the Western media is getting wrong about Iran — what’s missing in the coverage?
Well, first, I think that it’s impossible to cover a country like Iran from the outside. It’s such a gigantic, diverse country. There are a lot of different political leanings, different cultures. Look at regions like Kurdistan and others that have a unique culture of their own. Of course, there are some people who want change. There are some people who fully support the government — there are a lot of religious, conservative people. And there are people who are quite patriotic. But there are a lot of people just trying to live their lives. We meet a lot of guys who come to Iran from L.A., live there for several months and then go back. They aren’t after regime change.
One of the things we have to keep in mind is that despite the sanctions, Iran is still a very sophisticated economy. They have a lot of manufacturing, they have their car industry, they have a big services sector and a high-tech sector. We go in when big political events happen, or wars, or when there’s destabilization. But in general, Iran is still a functioning state with a lot of things, like electronic payments, social media, that you wouldn’t necessarily expect when you’re talking about a religiously-led state. It’s a big country with a lot of very smart people in it.
Has it become harder to do the sort of reporting you do — international crisis reporting — in our increasingly polarized, filter-bubble world?
If I go to places and just sort of lay out the facts, people still appreciate that. I know there are certain minefields with U.S. policy and politics, but in general, I think that it still works. Money-wise, resource-wise, I can’t really complain. I also did a lot of reporting in Ukraine, and CNN has spent a lot of time and a lot of resources reporting in Ukraine. For this 12-day war that just happened, we were in Iran, we had three reporters and an anchor in Israel. So when the big breaking news happens, we’re still there.
Do you think CNN will continue prioritizing this kind of reporting, especially given what’s happening at the corporate level, with you being spun off into a new, debt-laden company?
I don’t make corporate decisions, obviously, but I hope it doesn’t change. I also think that, especially for this kind of reporting, for the breaking news reporting, our viewer numbers and our click numbers go up. Breaking news is what people turn to CNN for. I think and hope that our bosses know that as well, and that’s why they put the resources into doing this. We’re in such a fast-paced, changing media environment right now, it’s difficult to say what business models are going to survive. But there’s a huge appetite for on-the-ground reporting. I hope that continues.
Looking at the situation in Iran now, during this ceasefire, what are the big questions for you about where it goes from here?
The key question now is how the situation between Iran, the U.S. and Israel will evolve. There’s a continued standoff, with the Trump administration asserting that Iran cannot enrich uranium, the Israelis threatening to strike again if they do and Iran insisting it will continue enrichment. For me, the big question is what are the next couple of months and years going to look like? Is it going to be more tit-for-tat strikes? Are the Iranians going to try and hit back? How is that going to destabilize the region? The Gulf states like Qatar and the UAE, who are geographically close, are clearly concerned. Many of these nations are actively trying to improve relations with Iran and would likely welcome a de-escalation from the U.S. as well. The two sides have been at it for such a long time that it’s probably difficult to get to the right place.
But I think there’s room for negotiation. I actually think [United States special envoy to the Middle East] Steve Witkoff has done a lot better job than he gets credit for, you know, speaking with [Iranian foreign minister Abbas] Araghchi, and trying to come to terms. Speaking to Iranians before this all happened, they seemed to be on a fairly good path, they seemed fairly optimistic that there could be a compromise. … Israel, obviously, is a big wild card there. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. But as far as the U.S. and Iran are concerned, where there are a lot of destabilizing factors, there still seems to be a will on both sides to at least start talking again at some point.