Mathias Döpfner – Achtung, Baby

Axel Springer's Mathias Döpfner wants to be an old-school press baron for the digital age, part Murdoch but also part Musk. And still very German.

- By Shawn McCreesh

We are living through the twilight of the press baron. Once, there were conquerors of newspapers, magazines, and television stations who thought as much about shaping public opinion and their own place in history as they did the bottom line. Some barons were terrible people, but at least they weren't dull. There was William Randolph Hearst, the warmongering inspiration for Citizen Kane, and Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian British owner of the Daily Express, which a century ago was the largest-circulation newspaper in the world and beat the drum for "Empire isolationism" in foreign policy. There was Henry Luce, whose Time magazine narrated the American Century (that would be last century), and Ted Turner, inventor of the 24-hour news cycle. More recently, there was Jeff Zucker, who didn't own CNN but acted a bit like he did, getting in the arena with Rupert Murdoch, backer of decades of right-wing crusades around the world. But at 91, Murdoch's not pulling the strings for much longer.

The more swashbuckling type of news boss just doesn't seem to last long these days. Zucker got the boot, and his replacement (what's his name again?) is focused on retrenchment. The New York Times is not run by anybody who seeks the spotlight, and Jeff Bezos doesn't seem all that excited about owning, much less wielding, the Washington Post. Maybe Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the media these days, but his trolling tirades seem less like a coherent worldview than an applause-hungry form of japery. The people who control the news now are servants to metrics like "scale" and "engagement" and are about as big a picture as the bullet points and briefing items they traffic in.