Most Germans will watch the Channel One (ARD, public TV) news show at 8 PM.....the Tagesschau, for their daily dose of national news. It's a rotational team (out of Hamburg) that does the 15-minute newscast.
Last night started like the normal 15-minute episode. The moderator was Jan Hofer. In an average month (30 nights), Jan probably does the show around four occasions. I should note....Jan is 69 years old.
Somewhere about three minutes into the live news program, you could tell that he was stumbling along. Midway (say around the 7 minute point).....it was obvious that he was having a fair amount of trouble. He wasn't focused. He was starting a sentence, getting three words into it.....then restarting the sentence.
Around the 12th minute, it simply intensified. My interpretation was that he was either having a stroke, or that he was affected by drug-usage.
After they wrapped up the weather segment, there's usually (in 100-percent of cases) a brief 10-segment back to the moderator who says what the 9:45 PM news will cover in-depth. Well, as they cut to Jan, he's leaning heavily on the desk and obviously in bad shape....silence. The camera is on him for about seven seconds, then they cut away.
There must have been thousands of calls or social media messages to ARD in the next half-an-hour, probably suggesting an ambulance call for the guy. ARD had taken him to the hospital, and his situation was discussed by 9:45 PM's news.
Jan had been out for a week or two with some viral infection, and they'd given the 69-year-old guy a fair amount of hyped-up drugs. Basically, he was reacting the way that you'd expect, and he probably should have been on another full week of bed-rest.
Oddly.....today, this is probably one of the top five stories of the day across Germany, and how Jan is.
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