The New Yorker Radio Hour - Politico’s Mathias Döpfner, and Sam Knight Reports from Qatar

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

The staff writer Sam Knight was in Qatar recently, reporting on the World Cup, where, despite years of controversy, a familiar rhythm of upsets, triumphs, and defeats has taken hold. But he finds that the geographical shift toward an Arab nation may benefit the sport. Plus, David Remnick talks with Mathias Döpfner, the C.E.O. of the German news publisher Axel Springer, which acquired Politico for a billion dollars last year. Döpfner relishes taking provocative stances, but has been a vocal critic of media outlets that he says are increasingly catering to partisan audiences. “I think it is not about objectivity or neutrality,” he notes. “It is about plurality.” Politico, Döpfner says, is taking “a kind of contrarian bet: if everybody polarizes, the few who do differently may have the better future.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The World Cup and Qatar this year was preceded by years and years of controversy. Charges of shameless corruption and mistreatment of migrant workers. But then the games finally began. Staff writer Sam Knight reported for us on the tournament. The first ten days of the World Cup in Qatar was soccer as it is rather than as you want it to be. It was venal, closed, and transactional. I saw some terrific

goals. I drank Coke and paid with my visa card. I lined up for the Adidas store. Everything was brand new, air-conditioned, and covered in an almost invisible layer of pale desert dust. Sam just got back from Qatar and he shared some of his impressions from on the ground and in the stands. This was my first World Cup. Yeah. Grown up with the tournament, watching it on TV, but this was the first time

I'd ever traveled to see it in person. There was something about this particular edition in Qatar, which was just irresistible to try and explore. You know, the whole world was in Qatar, because you did feel like you had kind of, you were shifted somewhere else on the world's axis, and the center of this tournament was the Middle East in the Arab-speaking world.

And they'd go to the, you know, The Suk in Doha. The call to prayer as you kind of walk to a game or as you came out. It rang to Moroccan fans and Tunisian fans and Saudi fans and Qatari fans. Literally a billion or more people in a different way and in a way that made it feel like their own. This was a very tame and well-behaved. and moderate sporting event.

I went to Argentina-Sadda Arabia, which was one of the kind of most exciting early matches in the tournament, and there were thousands of Argentinian fans. And there were tens of thousands of Saudi fans. If you're a reporter at one of these things, you have your own desk. So you sit at your desk, and then, like, during the game, you write down at your little table, like, what's happening.

But then at half-time, I'd go out and, like, mingle in the stadium concourse, and wander up to people and have conversations with them. So one of the people that I spent a bit of time with was a young Qatari guy called Ali. It was fascinating chatting to Ali about his parents' feelings before the family went to the opening game, this fear that maybe some soccer fans would come to the World Cup and they just wouldn't leave afterwards.

The Qataris, to varying degrees, were terrified of the influx. Families installed security cameras and checked their window locks. In the days before the World Cup, social media filled with prayers and stoic messages for the test ahead. And so the idea of, you know, a million soccer fans descending from all corners of the world was kind of terrifying to people who kind of like things to be extremely orderly and organized. I'm a football fan. You know, I'm English. I grew up in London.

in English stadiums, it's an immediate kind of sense, memory, overload of cigarette smoke and fried food and alcohol and unbearable language. And a kind of, you know, a tinge of danger. That was different in Qatar. It was safer, it was more polite. It was, you know, it was very welcoming in lots of ways.

I also had a really good chance. on Zoom one day with a young country woman called asthma. And she was a mad soccer fan. She was a big Real Madrid fan. She was saying, I want to get out into Doha and catch the atmosphere. But you know what? There are so many games on TV.

I'm just tied to my TV at the moment. She was just absolutely absorbed in it. All but condemned Germany to a second straight hoop stage. And she'd followed the reporting and the buildup to the tournament. you know, in great detail and felt kind of honestly confused by how Qatar didn't seem to be doing,

didn't seem to be able to do anything right. The fact that Dubai, a popular destination for European soccer players and their clubs, didn't seem to attract the same kind of ethical scrutiny, drove her crazy. They go to Dubai and they love Dubai, Asma said. They don't care about migrant workers,

there. They love to take pictures of Birch Khalifa, the world's tallest building, but they don't care about the people who build Birch Khalifa. It just gets like very confusing from an Arab perspective. Very, very, very confusing. I think for Qatari people, you know, they literally watched this evolving storyline of how awful they were. And it started with them being, you know, the corrupt people who paid for the World Cup. And then it moved on to, you know, the way that migrant workers were treated. And they just felt like, to use a soccer expression, like the goalposts were shifting every time.

It is the frankness of the Qatari system, more than its iniquity that is unusual. This is a common and almost universal kind of set up. That's what Natasha Iskandam, a migration scholar at New York University, told me. She said, and this is one of the reasons that we're all implicated in the system. It's not, you know, the Qatari is behaving badly.

it is us as a global community really having to confront what it looks like when you rely utterly on a system that deprives people of rights beyond their economic function. I think having been to this World Cup will make me experience

the sport a bit differently now. Just to have been shifted on my axis a bit. It's to see a sport that you've kind of known and followed through your whole life from a particular. really knowing and seeing these games play out in a very different place is something really meaningful.

And it's happened now so it can happen again. Sam Knight's full story at Cutter's World Cup, where politics and pleasure collide is at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, for Washington insiders and people in the media especially, Politico publishes some of the scoippiest and wonkiest reporting inside the Beltway. It's not what you'd call a mass market publication, but it's a highly influential one. And it's had some very big moments. It was Politico, after all, that obtained Samuel Alito's draft opinion from the Supreme Court about the decision that ended Roe v. Wade.

Last year, the German news publisher Axel Springer bought Politico for a pretty start. sum, a billion dollars. Springer is based in Berlin and owns the German tabloid build, among other properties. And it's led by CEO Matthias Duffner. Duffner is famously contrarian, and he likes to chide American media for pandering, he says, to increasingly partisan audiences, even as he himself seems to relish taking provocative stances on some very significant issues. I talk with Matthias Duffner recently. So a very basic question to begin. The media business, as you know, better than anybody, is a very tough business these days. Why did you spend a billion dollars to buy Politico? So for two main reasons. In general, I believe that journalism has a very bright future

if we get some things right. And to complain about digitization, as a threat to journalism, I think is just wrong. I think digital journalism is going to be better than analog journalism ever was, because there's so many more opportunities to have access to information to the intelligence of the users, to have no deadlines, to have unlimited space, to have a lot of new aesthetic opportunities, and also the business model is potentially better. So there are a lot of reasons for optimism. The most important thing is do we really focus on relevance and on integrity and trust,

worthiness of journalism, or do we trap into that, do we fall into that trap to polarize and just in a way amplify prejudice of our readers, which I think is not a sustainable model in the long run? And having said that, I have already in a way indicated the second reason. It is all about the quality of the content, about the kind of unpredictability and open-mindedness and non-partisan approach of journalism. We have this kind of contrary in that if everybody polarizes the few who do differently may have the better future. And I think Politico as a brand stands for that. You and I, we, and everybody else in our business has been to

a thousand conferences and conversations where we discuss partisanship and non-partisanship and objectivity and all those buzzwords. Let's be specific. There is no objectivity. Objectivity is already a because journalism is made by human beings and human beings have preferences. And if you run a story and if you position it prominently or big or small, that's already a judgment. So I think it is not about objectivity or neutrality. It is about plurality. It is about, in a way, fairness and it is about curiosity on facts. But let's be specific about the landscape in the United States,

which you are now entering in a big way. way. And is the New York Times, which is probably the most well-regarded newspaper in the country, along with, say, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, are these partisan or non-partisan news outlets, in your view? They are non-partisan news outlets because the diversity and quality of journalism that they deliver cannot be positioned as a kind of political agenda. there are developments where I take a more critical view, and that is if the head of the editorial pages has to resign because he published that guest commentary of a Republican senator

while he was not criticized of publishing guest commentaries by Putin or terrorists. So that I think is problematic, and the debate about freedom of expression is needed, but to portray brands like that as kind of partisan, I think, is too superficial. Now, Axel Springer, which owns Politico and much else, Axel Springer employees in Germany have to sign a pledge committing to quote principles that include a disavowal of racism, sexism, and political or religious extremism. And they've also got to support a united Europe, Israeli statehood and a free market economy.

Those are points of view. Why would Axel Springer want its reporters or editors anywhere to sign a pledge saying that they're not Brexiteers as opposed to people who support a United Europe or somebody who's arguing about the politics of Israel? I think it is a very important element of transparency and honesty of a media company. We had that discussion briefly. There is no neutral journalism. journalism and every publisher who pretends to be neutral is already lying.

That's why we thought, and if I say we, it is the founder of the company decades ago who started with four principles. Then I edited a fifth principle, which is solidarity within the free values of the transatlantic alliance. And we have modernized these five principles a couple of times. It is almost like a constitution of the company. Those are our fundamental social values. and that has nothing to do with party politics, with people politics, or with day-to-day politics.

So there is almost endless room within these values to, on a daily basis, on a very individual basis, take positions which are journalists too, but they do it based on that plurality of opinions. And I think it is very important to have, on the one hand, that transparency of these five constitutional values of Saxchus-Springer. Everybody knows what we stand for. And I take pride that in our company, not everybody writes what I think is right, and I encourage this kind of dialogue and debate. So what's confusing to me here on the pledge, for example, let's say I'm a Politico reporter, and I have doubts about a United Europe.

Let's say I was born in Britain, and I think, in fact, the United Europe didn't work for Britain, and I'm pro-Brexit, but I'm also committed to, I disavow racism, sexism, and all the rest. So if I have one part of the pledge that I don't feel comfortable with, I can't be a reporter at Politico? Well, for example, if you would deny the principle of the free market economy and would advocate socialism as the right model for a society, then I think they're better places to work for. Or if you say anti-Semitism should be spread on social media, that's the wrong company. Those are different things. But Brexit, let's go concretely into the details. I personally have given an interview to the Financial Times a day after Brexit and said,

I'm more worried about continental Europe and the EU than I'm worried about England. I think they were just running away from too much bureaucracy and a failed policy. So that criticism is happening every day. And one person is pro-Brexit, the other one against it, that I think does not in general mean that you are against the idea of a United Europe. Perhaps the EU institutions failed. and that's why that event was healthy. Now, the Washington Post reported weeks before the U.S. presidential election

that you sent a surprising message to your closest executives. You wrote, do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning of November 3rd and pray that Donald Trump will again become president of the United States of America? Can you clarify, were you kidding around? Were you dead serious? Yeah, everybody who met me once or spoke to me for, a couple of minutes know that that was a joke. It was under the impression of that breaking news that the administration of Trump is suing Google because of abuse of market domination, and that

is a topic that I was very involved with. And that was this kind of moment where basically every publisher around the world was happy about that decision. And in that context, I made that jokes to three executive colleagues in the chat. Everybody who wants to portray me as a Trumpist should read the text that I wrote for many years in 2017. I wrote an article where it described his language as the language of the mafia. So I think I'm not in that camp. But if you don't mind, you also went on to argue

that Trump has made the right moves on five of what you deem as the six most important issues of the last half century. Quote, defending the free democracies against Russia and China, pushing NATO allies to up their contributions, tax reform, and Middle East peace

efforts as well as challenging tech monopolies. So I'm just asking to be clear because the press coverage of you does, as you say, at times make you out to be, if not a Trumpist, then certainly Trump adjacent. I try to explain. When he took office, there was a very strong media bias in Europe and in America. And I think that has strengthened Trump even because he was. It was almost he became a hero, anti-establishment media. And that led also to some misunderstandings because sometimes the wrong people can promote the right things.

And in the case of Trump, very clearly, the example of China intuitively and conceptually, that was absolutely the right direction of politics, which is, by the way, continued to a surprising degree by the Biden administration. And I think it is really important to see the topic and not the person. another example is NATO, the push for adequate NATO funding, and it turned out to be so right after the experience of the Ukrainian war. So I think we have to distinguish general directions of policy and person. And then that leads us to the storm on the capital and the denial of election results happened.

And I think that is a moment where political discussions stopped. That it was a coup from the top. It was undermining democracy. It is perhaps the most severe threat to democracy in the recent U.S. history. And I think there should be zero tolerance. And I think party political discussions stop here. Last year, you ordered the Israeli flag to be flown in solidarity at company headquarters during unrest in Gaza. And I don't know what you were reacting to.

The anti-Semitic outbursts. at demonstrations, or you were taking aside vis-a-vis the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Absolutely not the latter, but the first. And it was a moment when on Berlin streets and all over Germany a lot of anti-Semitic demonstrations happened. And in that moment, we have four flags in front of our company, and very often the LGBT flag, or we have now at the moment the Ukrainian flag.

And in that moment when there were these anti-Semitic demonstrations, we said for one week, we flag the Israeli flag as a gesture of opposition against this form of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. Some people were criticizing that and said, well, I don't want to work for a company that was raising the Israeli flag. And then I said spontaneously, and I would repeat that whenever I'm asked again, if somebody really has an issue in such a situation, then perhaps there's a better place for you to work. for because if there is no sensitivity that particularly in Germany, in Berlin, where the Holocaust was planned and executed and where six million Jews were killed, the German guilt is still present. If there is not a kind of healthy reaction against it, and if you then set that gesture and people have an issue with that, then really perhaps there are better companies to work for. But I think, again, here also is transparency, and that does not mean that we advocate a one-state

solution or anything and we would also demonstrate for Palestinian rights of existence. We are for all rights of existence of legitimate institutions and nations. So Axel Springer supports the rise for Palestinian statehood. I personally prefer a two-state solution, but my personal preference is that it doesn't matter. I've always distinguished that very clearly. I speak up. I'm a journalist.

I worked for 20 years. A journalist. I'm occasionally writing. editorials, but that has zero impact on the very diverse editorial lines of our brands. No journalist ever cares what I think. I wonder how you see various media barons in our country. How do you see Rupert Murdoch? Is he a role model or is he a cautionary tale as far as his contributions to political discourse?

I know him and I think what he has done over the decades is a legendary achievement. Nevertheless, I would say I'm pretty much the anti-Murdog in my kind of self-definition. I think this whole idea of moguls and media barons is so outdated. I mean, maybe there was a time for that, but I think these times are over. So I'm a journalist who is running a media company in the role of a CEO and shareholder. I'm not a mogul. I don't want to be come one and I think for me the most important thing is to really empower journalists in their independence and in their intrinsic anti-authoritarian instincts. You have to decide whether you either employ journalists who obey or if you employ journalists who excel. And if they obey,

they cannot excel. And so you have to create a culture that they don't care what you think politically or ideologically. And also in that sense, I think a more pragmatic approach and a more forward-looking approach, a more progressive approach is our mindset. Is Fox News a positive contribution to the discourse in American democracy? I would put it this way. If Fox News is part of a diverse field of competition and perhaps also diverse world use, then it may be a contribution.

I don't want to judge. but our idea is different. What's wrong with judging it? It can be easily perceived as one competitor tells others what they should do or what they do well or not so well. I think I don't like, I'm not a friend of that, honestly. Let's talk about our own ideas and strategies and that perhaps then indirectly also gives answers

to how we see what the competitors are doing. On a more general basis, I truly think that this point, polarization of media landscape, and that is not only a US phenomenon, the same happens in Europe. I think it's really unhealthy, not only unhealthy for the society, but also unhealthy for media brands. And of course, social media have contributed to that. The business model is based on that. The highest click rates are generated by the most polarizing and extreme headlines and words. and I think that isn't a tremendous opportunity for real media brands to do differently. That's the opportunity for journalism, actually.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. With pleasure. Matthias Duffner is the CEO of Axel Springer, the company acquired Politico for a billion dollars last year. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening to the program today. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Brita Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Puttubuele. Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, Mike Cutchman, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.