Maik Meuser: The Face of RTL Aktuell

By CreativeQuizzes Editorial Team

A familiar face on German television every evening

If you've watched the evening news in Germany any time in the last decade, there's a good chance Maik Meuser has been the one delivering it. Born on July 12, 1976, in Cologne, he's spent years as one of the anchors of RTL Aktuell, the country's most-watched commercial news broadcast, and has become enough of a fixture that RTL's own audience-ranking data regularly lists him among the most-clicked names in German media.

He didn't start out chasing a career in front of the camera, though. Meuser studied political science and German literature in Mainz, which is a fairly standard route into journalism in Germany but not one that guarantees a national anchor desk at the end of it.

Building a résumé before RTL

Before RTL, Meuser worked as a freelancer for Arte's news programming in Strasbourg, then moved through stints at Deutsche Welle and the investigative outlet Correctiv. That combination — public broadcasting, cross-border European reporting, and investigative journalism — isn't the typical pipeline into a commercial news anchor job, but it's the one he took.

He's cited Günter Wallraff, the undercover investigative reporter famous for going undercover in factories and newsrooms to expose labor abuses, as one of the reasons he became a journalist in the first place — a detail he wrote about himself for turi2's 2020 anthology of media role models.

Taking the anchor chair at RTL Aktuell

Meuser has been a regular anchor on RTL Aktuell since November 2016, and his profile only grew after longtime lead anchor Peter Kloeppel stepped back from the role. By March 2024, industry tracker turi2 had him topping their daily most-clicked list among German media figures — ahead of departing ProSiebenSat.1 executives and sports colleagues alike.

The job isn't always smooth. In February 2023, a technical failure knocked out the video packages RTL Aktuell relies on for most of its runtime, leaving Meuser and co-anchor Ulrike von der Groeben to improvise live in front of roughly 600,000 viewers. RTL later admitted the broadcast had gone badly, blaming an IT failure — the kind of on-air moment that either derails an anchor's credibility or, handled well, reinforces it. Meuser's response — shifting between studio screens trying to salvage the segment — got him a mix of criticism and sympathy online rather than lasting damage.

Beyond the nightly broadcast

Meuser has also fronted a number of RTL Aktuell Spezial editions — the extended, single-topic broadcasts RTL runs when a story is big enough to reshuffle the schedule. He's anchored specials on Germany's 2023 refugee summit, a nationwide transport strike that grounded buses, trains, and flights, and a look at the country's summer heat and drought — the kind of assignments that go to whoever the network trusts to hold a longer, less scripted broadcast together.

Away from the desk, Meuser is married with three children and lives in the Rhineland. He's talked about the pandemic years, in particular, as a period that pushed his family closer together even as it upended normal life — by his own account, learning, playing, and cycling with his kids far more than he otherwise would have.

Why he's stuck around

There isn't one single defining story that made Meuser's career — it's more that he's shown up, night after night, for the better part of a decade, through breaking-news specials and on-air technical meltdowns alike. In an industry where audience trust in anchors is famously hard to build and easy to lose, that kind of consistency is its own kind of achievement.

Whether German viewers could name his full biography or not, most would recognize his face and voice instantly — which, for a nightly news anchor, is really the whole job description.