The CEO of the right-wing German multinational media conglomerate Axel Springer SE, one year before his company sealed the deal to purchase the highly-influential U.S. news brand Politico, sent an email to his top executives before the 2020 election asking if they would like to join him to pray for the re-election of Donald Trump, according to reports.
“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Germany-based Axel Springer, wrote in an email, The Daily Beast reports, citing an article in The Washington Post.
“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” Döpfner wrote.
As NCRM noted in a 2021 commentary on Politico publishing a hit piece dubbing Vice President Kamala Harris “Bluetooth-phobic” for choosing to wear corded earbuds (wireless poses strong security risks, which she has talked about before), Politico is owned by Axel Springer and Axel Springer is effectively owned by a million-dollar donor to Donald Trump.
Axel Springer’s majority owner is the U.S.-based investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). Henry Kravis, the second “K” in KKR, is a million-dollar Trump donor, according to Forbes.
“When asked about the message,” The Daily Beast added, “Döpfner initially denied it existed, going so far as to say: ‘It has never been sent and has never been even imagined.’ When confronted with a printout of the email, he explained that he may have sent it ‘as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.’ ‘That is me,’ he added. ‘That could be.'”
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But as The Washington Post reports, “Döpfner is given to bold pronouncements and visionary prescriptions.”
“He’s concerned that the American press has become too polarized — legacy brands like the New York Times and The Washington Post drifting to the left, in his view, while conservative media falls under the sway of Trumpian ‘alternative facts.’ So in Politico, the fast-growing Beltway political journal, he sees a grand opportunity.”
Not everyone sees The New York Times and The Washington Post as “drifting to the left,” and some, especially on social media, attack The Times daily for its artificial and false “bothsidesisms.” One Twitter account, The New York Times Pitchbot posts mocking “titles” that sound very much like what the Times would write.
Some also see Politico as a right-leaning brand. And should anyone question the position of Axel Springer, Foreign Policy in January wrote, “The new owner of Politico, Axel Springer, has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes.”
Politico was actually founded in 2007 and sold last year for over $1 billion to Axel Springer SE, the publisher of legacy brands such as Bild and Die Welt.
“We want to prove that being nonpartisan is actually the more successful positioning,” Döpfner told The Post in an interview, calling it his “biggest and most contrarian bet.”