Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Money Matters
Some 93.7 percent of shares of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung belong to FAZIT-Stiftung (FAZIT-Fund), a noncommercial publishing association mbH. According to the fund’s statute, income from the newspaper business can be used only for socially useful objectives. According to its own website, the fund promotes scientific research and selectively gives grants.
Website Lobbypedia presents the ownership structure of the FAZIT-Stiftung in details and notes that "The copartners of the FAZIT-Stiftung that is particularly a majority shareholder of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH are mostly businessmen, which partly hold offices in different economic unions and are members of neoliberal networks."
Essentials
Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has a circulation of 265,000 copies and does not belong to any big media group. Since 1998, its circulation has fallen by 34 percent.
Since 2012, the newspaper publishing business has been creating losses. 200 out of 900 FAZ’s staff members are expected to be dismissed by 2017.
By contrast with other media, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s general attitude is not subject to approval by editor-in-chief nor by a group of executive editors. The newspaper has over 40 foreign correspondents.
Key People
Frank
Schirrmacher
Before his death in June 2014, Schirrmacher was one of the most famous and industry’s acclaimed FAZ’s executive editors. Alongside with being responsible for the newspaper’s literary supplement, he wrote several influential books and published numerous contributions to the debate on the social impact of digitalization.
Controversies
German dailies are the world’s leaders in distributing negative image of Russia. It is demonstrated by the results of a survey published by the Russian Sputnik news agency.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung takes the first place in this list with Süddeutsche Zeitung and Austrian Standard newspaper sharing the second place.
FAZ published an extremely one-sided interest-driven article authored by the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the print issue in January 2015, failing to present any disclaimer or to highlight the highly-opinionated nature of the article.
In the NSA surveillance scandal, FAZ consistently backed the intelligence organization.
An acknowledged NATO adviser, Sandro Gaycken, repeatedly published guest articles in FAZ, in which he openly advocated mass surveillance conducted by the NSA and German intelligence BND.
In 2014, Udo Ulfkotte, who had previously worked as a journalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 17 years, published a book titled ‘Gekaufte Journalisten’ (‘Journalists-for-hire’). In this book, he describes first-hand the behind-the-scenes practices within the German media mainstream and speaks about corruption, lies and deliberate manipulation in the media. The book topped the bestseller list in Germany for several months. RT International and RT Deutsch interviewed Ulfkotte and asked him about the issues he described in his book. Answering these questions, he particularly said: “I was taught to lie and to deceive there.”