The dark history of the Telegraph's new owner...

Analysis in the British press focuses on Axel Springer's attitude to Brexit but a closer look suggests its worldview is just Right for the Telegraph's existing editorial approach.

Previously: Trump’s British bullies with a byline

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This newspaper is an organ of depravity. It is wrong to read it. Anyone who contributes to this newspaper is absolutely unacceptable in society. It would be wrong to be friendly or even polite to any of its editors. One must be as unfriendly to them as the law just barely allows. They are bad people doing bad things.

— Max Goldt on Axel Springer’s tabloid Bilt, from his book Der Krapfen auf dem Sims

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Late last week, it was announced that the German media giant Axel Springer is buying the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, ending a three-year saga in which the titles were without a permanent owner. The £575 million cash offer for the Telegraph knocked out a rival bid from Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail Group, which had been subject to an investigation by the competition and media regulators.

Defeat for Rothermere led to celebrations from liberals of all kinds, but the irony of the Brexit-trumpeting Telegraph being acquired by a German company is a surface-level analysis. Axel Springer’s history and worldview actually make it a fitting custodian of Britain’s most unhinged newspaper group.

Axel Springer has bid £575m to buy the Telegraph. When it previously bid for the group in 2004, it offered £600m — beaten by a debt-powered £665m offer from the Barclay brothers. With inflation, that 2004 bid would be about £1.1bn now, and analysts generally feel that Axel Springer overpaid for the Telegraph (most valued the group at closer to £350m). The Telegraph titles are a distressed asset that its new owner clearly believes it can ‘rationalise’ and turn into a force in the US.

While it is a good thing that the Daily Mail Group was not able to gobble up an even larger percentage of the British media market, the idea that Axel Springer is somehow morally better is for the birds. Let’s start at the beginning of the Axel Springer story:

In 1948, Axel Springer — the man who gave the company its name — started his first paper, the Hamburger Abendblatt, under a licence from British occupation authorities. Four years later, he launched the national title, Bild Zeitung, inspired by the Daily Mirror but quickly becoming Germany’s equivalent of The Sun. It was memorably described by the band Die Ärzte as “Angst, Hass, Titten und der Wetterbericht” (“Fear, hatred, tits and the weather report.”) In the fifties, Axel Springer received direct support from the CIA, in the region of $7 million. Springer was identified as someone who would be sympathetic to “American geopolitical interests”.

Springer called Bild his “dog on a chain” and used it to ruthlessly attack his enemies. In a 1967 speech at the Übersee Club in Hamburg, an organisation of merchants and industrialists, he said: “It is my credo that a newspaper publisher has no right to remain politically indifferent”. And Springer used that lack of political indifference to target the Left, which he so despised. During the 1968 student movement in Germany, articles in Axel Springer publications, especially Bild, urged readers to “stop the terror of the young reds now!” and “eliminate the trouble makers”.

On April 11, 1968, a house painter called Josef Bachmann heeded those calls when he gunned down Rudi Dutschke, the most prominent and active face of the student movement, shooting him in the head and shoulder as he cycled to the pharmacy to buy cold medicine for his son. Dutschke survived the initial attack but died from complications related to it eleven years later on Christmas Eve, 1979. Axel Springer papers had dubbed Dutschke ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ and published photos of him with the caption, ‘Stop Dutschke Now!’ They got their wish. As one popular left-wing slogan put it, “Bild hat mitgeschossen!” (“Bild shot at him too!”)

Then, as today, Axel Springer had five ‘essentials’ that it required its journalists to sign up to as effectively commandments: 1) Standing up for freedom, free speech, the rule of law and democracy 2) Supporting the right of the existence of the State of Israel and opposing all forms of antisemitism 3) Advocating an alliance between the United States of American and Europe 4) Upholding the principles of a free market economy 5) Rejecting political and religious extremism and all forms of discrimination.

At first, they might not seem too unreasonable. But the reality is that they are not a creed to ensure balance, but a set of rules to ensure the essential rightward focus of the company. In 1977, the journalist Günter Wallraff went undercover at Bild and found a newsroom of startling cynicism and brutality. He said, “I believe it’s the most difficult role I’ve ever played. Compared to that, backbreaking, dirty work in a factory on an assembly line is almost a relief. Because with this filth you’re exposed to here, you have no distance, no defence mechanisms.”

In one scene detailed in Wallraff’s book on the experience, Der Aufmacher, he recalls a Bild reporter listening to a distressed man who has called a fake suicide-prevention hotline that the newspaper has set up. The hack whispers to Wallraff: “He’s about to jump off the balcony any minute, he’s nearly there!”

Heinrich Böll’s 1972 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is a denunciation of Bild and Axel Springer more generally, encased in the finest fictional wrapping. The titular character is an innocent housekeeper whose life is totally ruined by the attentions of a tabloid reporter and the police. The fictional newspaper is called Die Zeitung, but is quite obviously modelled on Bild-Zeitung. In a 1972 essay — ‘Does Ulrike want mercy or safe passage?’ — for Der Spiegel, criticising Bild’s sensationalist coverage of the Red Army Faction, Böll wrote that the paper was “no longer crypto-fascist, no longer fascisoid, but naked fascism. Incitement, lies, filth”.

Not a great deal has changed in the intervening years. According to the German Press Council, the country’s newspaper regulator, Bild has received over 300 reprimands since 1986, the most of any news outlet in the country. The issues involved include sensationalism, privacy violations, factual inaccuracies, and unethical reporting. One — ongoing — the latter is the Bibileaks scandal that began in 2024.

In an article published in September 2024, Bild claimed to have exclusive access to documents from Hamas’s “military intelligence agency”. It said, “Hamas is not seeking a quick end to the war that would help the people of Gaza,” and suggested that the group aimed to “make the hostages’ families so desperate that they’ll do ANYTHING to free their loved ones, even if that means going against their own government.”

Subsequently, German public broadcaster NDR’s Panorama show said it had obtained the full document cited by Bild and said that the newspaper had distorted its contents to further the interests of the Israeli government. The transcript revealed by Panorama showed Hamas expressing interest in a long-term ceasefire and showing willingness to be flexible in negotiations, including proposing a truce. Panorama called Bild and Axel Springer “one loyal friend” to Benjamin Netanyahu.

A court case into ‘Bibileaks’ revelations is still ongoing in Israel. Tzachi Braverman, Netanyahu’s chief of staff, is alleged to have interfered with the investigation into the leak of classified documents. The suggested aim of the leak to Bild was to influence Israeli public opinion at the time. Who’d have imagined that a constitutionally pro-Israel, pro-US company would be used as a conduit for such dirty tricks?

At the top of Axel Springer, its CEO Mathias Döpfner — who also sits on the boards of Netflix and Warner Music — is a close friend of Elon Musk and a selection of other unseemly tech bros. During the German elections in 2024, Musk published an op-ed in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, owned by Axel Springer, in strong support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Döpfner told The Times last year that Musk is “clearly a genius” and that the op-ed was “a global scoop… we should be proud about it and not apologise”.

In 2024, Döpfner spoke about young journalists being “very emotionally involved in climate activism; they want to fight racism; they want to defend minorities. They have idealistic goals, and they become journalists in order to deliver on these goals. I think that’s a dangerous misunderstanding of journalism”. The year before, messages he wrote in 2019 were leaked to Die Zeit. He said, “I am all for climate change” and argued that human civilisation was always “more successful” in periods of warm climate. In the same message, he summed up his foreign policy position as: “Free West, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riff-raff.”

Döpfner’s response to the leaks came in a statement uploaded to Axel Springer’s internal message board and made available to journalists. He said: “Articles of mine published over four decades show the way I think. I let myself be taken to account for every published word. But out-of-context fragments of texts and conversations cannot be held up as my ‘true way of thinking’.” Or, you could say that his private thoughts were simply not as polished and prepared as the ones he offers publicly.

For all Döpfner’s rhetoric about Axel Springer pushing ‘non-partisan’ reporting, there are plenty of examples of the company using its media power to further its business interests. In 2007, there was a flurry of reports in Axel Springer titles attacking the minimum wage in Germany. Was this because of the company’s philosophical support for free markets? No! It was because its private postal service PIN AG was built on thousands of workers earning half the new proposed minimum.

The Daily Telegraph, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and some very weird Winnie the Pooh fan fiction...

Another indication that Axel Springer might just be the perfect new custodian for the Telegraph titles is the way it approached Covid. During the pandemic and since, the Telegraph has been a conduit for the most aggressive ‘sceptics’. Bild fought a similar war with constant attacks on lockdown measures, vaccination campaigns, and mask mandates. Headlines at the time included attacks on the German government’s “corona fetish” and claims that the nation was suffering from “a policy pandemic”.

Look back through Bild’s back catalogue of folk devils and moral panics, and you’ll find many of the same topics that drive Telegraph columnists into a frothing frenzy: young people, migrants, crime, and Islam. Perhaps one innovation from Bild that the Telegraph might introduce is a British spin on the German paper’s line of nationalistic Volks-Produkte (People’s Products), which has included Volks-Jeans and Volks-Pizza. It could make a much more reliable new revenue stream than giving out handfuls of free subscriptions with every paid one.

Those Telegraph readers who fear that their favourite propaganda sheet being purchased by a bunch of Jerries means it’ll go woke need not worry. I suspect that Axel Springer will keep it on the same track — supporting Reform, demonising refugees and benefit recipients, and banging the drum for US and Israeli foreign policy with unsettling enthusiasm.

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