Eugen Freund has been a familiar face on Austrian TV for 25 years. After serving as a press officer at the Austrian Mission to the United Nations in New York (1979-1984) he returned to Vienna to become an anchorman for the late-night evening news of Austrian TV (ORF).
He was later reassigned to cover the controversial presidential campaign of Kurt Waldheim and, in 1988, Mr. Freund joined the team of the “Auslandsreport”, a TV-magazine of foreign affairs. In this capacity he reported on the Bush/Gorbachov summit in Malta, the fall of the Berlin wall, the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, the first Gulf war and on many other international events.
In 1995, Mr. Freund moved to Washington, D.C., to begin his assignment as US-correspondent for ORF. He became bureau chief in 1998, a position which he held until the summer of 2001.
While in the US, he covered every aspect of the political, economic and cultural life. The most memorable of which were the bombing of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma, Bill Clintons second run for the White House, the Lewinsky affair, the Bush/Gore election campaign, the inauguration of George W. Bush and countless other events.
Only three weeks after his return from the United States, Mr. Freund was on the air, as a co-anchor in the studio, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In recent years he has mainly served as Special Correspondent and as a political analyst of international affairs. He interviewed Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, and Yasser Arafat, among many others.
Mr. Freund also served as a long-time contributor to the CNN “World Report” and, more recently, as a free lance correspondent for NPR. He has contributed op-eds to the “Washington Post”, articles by him also appeared in the German weekly “DIE ZEIT” the Swiss “WELTWOCHE” and in many other publications. His book “Mein Amerika” (My America) made it to the Austrian best-seller list. Later on he published “Obama – der lange Weg ins Weisse Haus” (Obama – the Long Path to the White House) “Brennpunkte der Weltpolitik” (Flashpoints of World Politics) and, most recently a photo book with pictures he took within the last 40 years “Zeit in Bildern” (Breshnev- Carter meeting in Vienna 1979, Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989, Bill Clinton, impressions of New York and many others…) Since May of 2011, Eugen Freund has been anchoring the Evening News (“Zeit im Bild”) at the Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF).