Telegraph takeover: Eurocrat subversion or Anglo-Bildungsbürgertum?

On the Axel Springer Telegraph acquisition

Democracy, argued Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, was indistinguishable from plutocracy, since public opinion would be beholden to the media, behind which invariably stood moneyed interests. This thesis, dismissed as conspiratorial thinking in sunnier lands whose intellectuals have a greater reverence towards the ‘democratic public sphere’, has found resonance in Britain, where the ownership of the nation’s august media brands weighs heavily on the national consciousness. American liberals might lament the malevolent influence of Fox News over their own public sphere, yet some effort is usually made to sociologise conservatism; few would be so epistemically bold as to write off the entirety of right-wing politics as a factory accident of history caused by Murdoch’s black mischief — in this country, it seldom occurs that man’s fate might be determined by anything other than gods playing games with dice. Movements in the media market are condemned by journalistic opinion in the shrill language of ‘national security’ and ‘democratic integrity’, viz. Baron Lebedev of Siberia’s acquisition of the Independent and the Evening Standard, Paul Marshall’s Spectator swoop, and most recently RedBird IMI and their Emirati backers’ botched Special Media Operation against The Telegraph. Regardless of our own opinions on that hallowed institution, it is worth considering the meaning of this sale.

In this inhospitable climate, Axel Springer SE merits praise for its discretion. Not a whisper of the German media conglomerate’s designs on The Telegraph was heard until a week before an agreement was reached with RedBird to purchase, for five hundred and seventy-five million white English pounds, the latter’s option on the illustrious centre-right broadsheet. There remain various legal fineries to be tied up, and the Culture Secretary will have the final word on the sale, but given Ms Nandy’s prior opposition to Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere’s earlier bid and the lack of other potential buyers, it is unlikely that the deal will encounter any serious hindrance.

The editors of these pages have raised eyebrows amongst their new Westminster neighbours for their curious ideological fervour. Springer’s singular worldview is the product of a postwar Germany in search of a new identity, specifically of its eponymous founder’s crusade to reeducate his fellow citizens in the democratic spirit blowing across the Atlantic. It is so sui generis as to sound like gobbledygook to anyone not steeped in the idiom of the German feuilleton. It is ultimately — fitting for the nation of Spengler, and perhaps not surprising for a company whose owner began his career as a music critic — rooted in a peculiar narrative of cultural history, which pendulates between an intense despair over the lost world of Judaeo-German Bildungsbürgertum and a belief that only the dynamism of new, mass cultural impulses blowing over from the Atlantic (think less Wokeness and more “blue jeans and rock music”) can renew the liberal spirit that breathed through the moral universe of Goethe and Schiller, Heine and Wagner (to whom Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner devoted an entire chapter in his highly readable 2011 headbanger The Freedom Trap).

Springer understands its role as laying the political ‘framework conditions’ for this renaissance; to these ends it requires its German employees — albeit not its American ones — to sign a declaration committing them to a constantly updated, yet essentially constant, set of ‘essentials’ — things like support for Israel, the transatlantic alliance, the market economy, and the rejection of ‘extremism and discrimination’ which will hardly raise eyebrows at The Telegraph. More pertinently, this catalogue once included ‘support for a united Europe’, which, while no longer featured in the most recent declaration, has hardly gone away. That this will hardly do aboard the Barclay brothers’ boozy Brexit battleship has not been lost on anyone.

Telegraph readers need not cancel their subscriptions. While Springer follows a political as much as a commercial logic, precisely its liberal ethos commits it to editorial pluralism so long as its red lines are maintained. While the company includes lefty titles like Politico, Die Welt, the company’s home market flagship, has consistently criticised the CDU from the right, led the charge against lockdowns, and has recently dallied with the AfD (in a rather liberal interpretation of the transatlantic mission, it also printed Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the Syrian Civil War when he could not find an American publisher). Döpfner has spoken favourably of Brexit in the past, and the Brexiteer vision of a swashbuckling mercantile island spurring on Brussels into a spiral of competitive deregulation is easily reconcilable with Springer’s house philosophy of a free-trading Europe integrated into a wider transatlantic order. Lastly, Döpfner, who for all his extensive history of public interventions has had remarkably little to say on British politics, can be expected to defer to his editors’ wisdom in quotidian matters.

What, if not a desire to influence events on these isles, explains Springer’s interest in The Telegraph? Döpfner’s stated ambition to make the paper ‘the leading centre-right media outlet in the English-speaking world’ and that he intends to do so through ‘a digital-only strategy’ is telling. The former music journalist talks frequently of purchasing a big, historic American publication, but lacks funds proportionate to his ambitions. British journalism retains, despite it all, a lingering prestige in Washington; to speak the primordial impulses of the Republican base in cut-glass tones was the strategy pioneered by Paul Dacre, who laundered earthy midwestern common sense through the sleek, modernist newsrooms of Fleet Street with the professionalism and subtlety of the Albania mafia’s finance division. This role has never been more in demand than now, as the American Right nostalgically gazes towards Europe as a repository of ‘civilisational values’ and solicits the counsel of passed-over European intellectuals as the slow realisation dawns that their country’s demographic disintegration, while not inevitable, is beyond their power to reverse. It would be a gentle irony of history if The Telegraph, having left Europe, were to find a role as a colonial outpost of Bildungsbürgertum in the jungles of Trump’s America.

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This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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