There was once a CEO of CNN called Jeff Zucker, and at the same time, a reporter on CNN called Brian Stelter, and because they were both bald, whenever Stelter degenerated into a monologue – about how much he hated people who thought differently – people suspected that Zucker had just painted eyes, a nose and a mouth on his right thumb, and was wiggling it around for the camera.
Zucker wasn’t the world’s worst human being by any stretch, and he was certainly no slouch. After his departure in 2022 – for a breach of standards in failing to disclose a sexual relationship with a subordinate – Zucker joined the joint venture of RedBird Capital and International Media Investments (Abu Dhabi) as CEO.
Months after Zucker joined RedBird IMI, Lloyds Bank in London seized control of The Telegraph Group, once owned by the Barclay twins. Family debts had forced the hand of the bank, which opened the door to Zucker at the end of 2023. RedBird IMI stumped up £600m they intended to convert into full ownership of TMG’s Telegraph and Spectator magazine.
But the natives weren’t convinced. In particular, the sale of the Telegraph – ostensibly to a vehicle privately controlled by the Vice-President and deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan) – was a line too red.
Zucker’s bid was fortuitous as it came at a time when the older generation of readers had shuffled off. Had the attempt been made in or around 2010/2011, the indignation ‘We can’t be seeing selling such an asset to a foreign power’ – would have been heard in South Africa.
Despite frantic lobbying from a former Chancellor and a firm owned by former ministers, Zucker ultimately failed, but when hedge-fund executive Paul Marshall bought The Spectator for £100m, and an offer for The Telegraph for £575m from German group Axel Springer was accepted this year, RedBird IMI walked away with £75m, so, not exactly a poo sandwich.
Axel Springer’s CEO Mathias Döpfner was initially reassuring to Telegraph staff. Speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) in London in the summer, he said: “It sometimes looks more likely that we are at the beginning of the end of the open society model” because authoritarian systems (China, Russia) show strong leadership while many centrist democracies are ‘stumbling’.“
Encouraging
Döpfner’s remarks were indeed encouraging, and he further committed to enhancing the centre-right news audience – which he claimed was ‘underserved’. South Africa knows only too well what happens when weak men are appointed editors of large, legacy platforms.
But then October came, and with it, news of dramatic changes mounting in the newsroom. The rumours refused to disappear, and in late October the man I considered the newspaper’s finest economics contributor, Liam Halligan, was given his marching orders. (His long-running Sunday Telegraph “Economic Agenda” column is ending at the end of November).
Halligan is almost unique in that he is the son of a working-class Irish family, and grew up in a deprived suburb of north-west London. He was the first in his family to go to university, graduating with a first-class degree in economics from Warwick and an MPhil in economics from Oxford, before moving to Russia (where he worked as an economist and later served as chief economist for an emerging-markets asset manager). Earlier in the year Halligan was appointed director at the Centre for Policy Studies (succeeding the equally gifted economist, Robert Colvile).
You don’t replace someone like Halligan easily. You could further argue that someone with his background and experience is exactly the kind of commentator the United Kingdom needs, as it circles the drain economically. Nobody else in the newsroom possesses his ability to undress the standard financial ineptitude and illiteracy of a political party. Nobody is prepared to confront the country’s self-inflicted carnage so assertively.
Negotiating her departure
Who will succeed Halligan at The Telegraph? A Grokbot, apparently, or similar AI, programmed to absorb volumes of economic data, then project it in ways Halligan’s audience grew accustomed to. Another popular columnist, Allison Pearson, who appeared on a Telegraph weekly podcast with Halligan, is also in the process of negotiating her departure. But Axel Springer already appears to have miscalculated.
In recent years, and particularly since lockdowns, audiences have formed stronger-than-ever-before bonds with the writers they read and follow. This is partially because everyone else in the media – like in South Africa – is perpetually lying, or denying the obvious, or complicit in the scheme of managed decline, and partially because the familiarity breeds the kind of re-assurance people find meaning in: the kind Döpfner has evidently reneged on.
So The Telegraph’s fate will be decided by German centrists, increasingly comfortable with their new toy and eager to advance principles they feel come naturally. But here’s the catch: lots of media support the pro-net-zero, anti-far-right, diversity-is-our-strength narrative. Many writers are paid well to express these views. And that’s ok. But if it’s going to be a machine that does it … then why pay?
[Image: AbsolutVision on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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