Yamiche Alcindor is named host of ‘Washington Week’ on PBS

She succeeds Robert Costa at a program best known as the longtime home of the anchor Gwen Ifill.

By Michael M. Grynbaum for The New York Times

Last month, when Yamiche Alcindor learned she would become the next moderator of the PBS current-affairs show “Washington Week,” she immediately felt the emotion of the moment.

“I basically instantly cried,” Ms. Alcindor recalled, “thinking about Gwen.”

“Washington Week,” a calm redoubt in the shouty battleground of political television, is most closely associated with its longtime moderator Gwen Ifill, the pioneering journalist who broke barriers as a Black woman in the Washington press corps.

Before her death in 2016, Ms. Ifill also became a mentor to Ms. Alcindor, the White House correspondent at “PBS NewsHour.” Starting with the episode on Friday, Ms. Alcindor, 34, will take Ms. Ifill’s old chair at the helm of “Washington Week.” She succeeds Robert Costa, a reporter for The Washington Post who took over in 2017 and left the show this year.

PBS and WETA-TV, the Washington affiliate that produces the program, announced the appointment of Ms. Alcindor on Tuesday.

“I know how much ‘Washington Week’ meant to Gwen, and how much she put her stamp on the legacy of the show,” Ms. Alcindor, who is Haitian-American, said in an interview. “I also feel this incredible responsibility to think deeply about taking this on and making it a show that people want to watch, that people will feel is living up to its great legacy.” Continue reading