Conference 2026
Panel: Who Owns the Narrative: Media, Truth and Power in the Age of AI
Kai Gniffke was born on 20 November 1960 in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his studies in political science, sociology and public law in 1992, obtaining a PhD (Dr. phil.). He worked as a reporter and later as a senior editor for the SWF television news in Mainz and, from 1995, as a state political correspondent. In 1999, he took over as head of the ARD Aktuell editorial team at SWR in Rheinland-Pfalz. From 2003 to 2005, he was deputy editor-in-chief of ARD Aktuell. From 2006 to 2019, as Chief Editor of ARD Aktuell, he was responsible for Tagesschau, Tagesthemen and tagesschau.de. In 2019, Mittweida University appointed Kai Gniffke as Honorary Professor of ‘Journalism in the Digital Transformation’. He has been Director-General of Südwestrundfunk since September 2019.
In 2007, Kai Gniffke received the Grimme Online Award for his work as a writer on the Tagesschau blog. In 2018, he represented ARD in the European Commission’s “High Level Expert Group on Fake News”.