The Right wing media giant Axel Springer joins American hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman in threatening independent journalism.
Journalists working for Business Insider broke the story last week that billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman’s wife had plagiarized sources for her published work.
The reason why this made news was because Ackman had just succeeded in forcing out Harvard’s president Claudine Gay with charges of plagiarism.
Ackman’s real beef with Dr. Gay wasn’t about her scholarly pursuits however. It had more to do with Ackman being upset that Dr. Gay hadn’t sufficiently cracked down off students protesting Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.
While Business Insiders reporters were just reporting the facts, the facts alone demonstrated what a hypocrite and a blowhard Ackman is.
But there’s more.
Bill Ackman has threatened to investigate every reporter at Business Insider.
And he is being joined by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer that owns BI.. Axel Springer is named for its Right wing founder, now deceased.
I remember Axel Springer from the sixties. With close ties to the CIA, Axel Springer was a leading German supporter of the United States’ war in Vietnam and a media voice attacking the German anti-war movement and student protests of the war.
My friends in the German student movement at the time returned the favor by mounting huge protests against Axel Springer.
Axel Springer himself, the empire’s founding father, did not hide that he used Bild and the daily broadsheet Die Welt to intervene in German and European politics—often on issues that directly benefited the fortunes of the media house. Born in 1912 to a well-known publisher, Springer started Bild Zeitung in 1952, in imitation of the United Kingdom’s tabloid press. The daily was immediately recognizable, as it is today, with its giant full-page headlines and mix of provocative right-wing editorializing, soft porn, and sensationalist lowbrow stories. Circulation skyrocketed—aided by the helping hand of the CIA and British occupation military. The Axel Springer publishing house branched out from there. By the 1960s, it owned dozens of regional dailies, glossy weeklies, and other major national publications such as Die Welt, and it has dominated the German media landscape ever since.
In recent years the Axel Springer media empire has expanded to the United States with the purchase of Business Insider and Politico.
Yes. Axel Springer, who demands employee loyalty to Israel, now owns Politico.
The Times of Israel reported in 2021:
Axel Springer, named after the journalist who founded it in the 1940s, has long been a staunch supporter of Israel. On its website, the second of the company’s five core principles reads, “We support the Jewish people and the right of existence of the State of Israel.”
The company, which owns some of Europe’s most-read publications, including Die Welt and Bild, apparently requires its European employees to sign a pledge in support of “the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel, among other favored values,” according to Smith’s report.
Now we have Bill Ackman calling his friends at Axel Springer to investigate their own journalists at Busiiness Insider for reporting the facts about Ackman’s wife.
It’s pretty sick.