Media Pluralism in Germany

Owners and managing directors are listed in the commercial register, which has been freely accessible for some time now. In addition, journalists have access to the transparency register. This not only lists the shareholders, but also the beneficial owners, i.e. the people who are actually behind the company. The mission of MOM is to present this transparently.

The same sentence is enshrined in the first place in all 16 state press laws: ‘The press is free.’ Article 5 of the German constitution Grundgesetz also protects media reporting from state influence. In addition, a public broadcasting system modelled on the BBC in the UK was created after the Second World War to ensure that broadcasting was independent of the state and financed by the public.

If you were to randomly ask passers-by in a German pedestrian zone about the most important news media on the internet, you would mainly hear brands such as Spiegel, Tagesschau or Bild. However, their brand popularity is only reflected to a limited extent in their actual distribution, as there are two underestimated giants in the German media landscape: News networks and email providers.