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by alephnerd 1064 days ago
I keep seeing people saying this about Politico and it's total FUD. I have friends who work there and it's pretty firewalled from Axel Springer. This conspiracy theory about the Politico portion seems to have started in r/Europe and r/WorldNews a couple months ago and kept getting repeated since.
4 comments
ttepasse 1064 days ago
Matthias Doepfner’s mails and chats including pressure to upsell the FDP in Springer’s papers leaked in April and were widely reported. That’s not a conspiracy theory. If it were, Doepfner could sue. He didn’t.

https://www.zeit.de/2023/16/mathias-doepfner-axel-springer-i...

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alephnerd 1064 days ago
Not denying Axel Springer's practices in Germany.

I'm just calling it as I know it having worked closely with people who currently work at Politico or used to work at Politico,

What happens in the future I can't predict, but were there to be any kind of meddling in a HEAVILY AMERICAN newsroom would

1. Be very openly reported on by their competitors

2. See a massive amount of disgruntled ex-employees leaving for Axios (eg. the exodus at Protocol), The Hill, etc.

3. Wokld be talked about openly as a lot of us have worked closely with Politico members.

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alphager 1064 days ago
So Döpfner (who is on record ordering his "journalists" to push the FDP in the last election) just bought Politico and doesn't make sure they follow the directions he sets for all the other publications owned by Springer? Seems unlikely.
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oska 1064 days ago
A firewall operates purely in the physical world and relies on immutable properties of the physical world to function. To use it as a metaphor in the intellectual/political world (where nothing is immutable) is exceedingly unhelpful and I would say, often deliberately misleading. There is no 'firewall' inside Axel Springer, there is no 'firewalling'. Talk like that is pure nonsense.
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mistrial9 1064 days ago
the name of the publication has the word "politics" in the title?
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alephnerd 1064 days ago
Politico is DC slang for someone who works politics adjacent (hence why their competitor "The Hill" is named that)

Politico started as a blog and newsletter on the Hill back in the late 2000s/early 2010s where we'd leak gossip, but they had amazing product-market fit and ended up opening an EU office a couple years ago (lots of Hill adjacent people also worked in Parliament and Bundestag via early career Atlanticist programs).

A couple of my own quotes have ended up in Politico

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