Gabor Steingart

Last updated

Gabor Steingart
Maischberger - 2018-06-20-6574.jpg
Steingart in 2018
Born1962
NationalityGerman
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • Author
Website www.gaborsteingart.com

Gabor Steingart (born 1962 in West Berlin) is a German journalist and the author of several popular and influential books. He was the chief editor of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2018. In 2018, he founded his own media company that issues news, commentaries, and interviews.

Contents

Steingart indicates that "freedom of expression is not a gift, it is an obligation. The problem is not the critical journalists, the problem is the harmless ones." [1]

Life

Steingart was born 1962 in Berlin-Kreuzberg as a son of a Hungarian political asylum seeker and a Berlin woman. He studied political science and macroeconomy at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and at Freie Universität Berlin. After finishing his university studies he went to the Georg von Holtzbrinck-Schule für Wirtschaftsjournalisten  [ de ] in Düsseldorf. Steingart first worked for the economic magazine Corporate Finance and after that for Wirtschaftswoche . He joined Der Spiegel as a business correspondent in 1990 and became its Berlin bureau chief in 2001, a post he held until 2007. He then moved to the United States of America and worked as the magazine's senior Washington DC correspondent. On 5 April 2010, he became the chief editor of Handelsblatt , Germany's leading economic newspaper. He was dismissed by the publisher Dieter von Holtzbrinck in early 2018. [1] [2]

Steingarts Morning Briefing

Steingart founded "Media Pioneer" in Berlin in 2018. In June 2018, he started to issue a Monday-Friday daily newsletter called Steingarts Morning Briefing in German with a focus on politics and economics. Distributed by email it became quickly the top newsletter in Germany. [1] Since August 2018, he has also issued a daily Der Podcast with commentaries and interviews of people in politics, economics, and culture. As of 2022, Pioneer Media claims to have more than 200,000 newsletter subscribers and over one million podcast listens per week. [3] The venture, which included the launch of the world's first boat built for journalism in 2020, has expanded to include over 30 journalists and plans have been unveiled to launch another vessel, the Pioneer Two. [4]

Works

Steingart has written several highly popular books. Deutschland. Der Abstieg eines Superstars (2004), in which he criticised the country's lackluster economy and the politicians' inability to reform, stayed on the bestseller lists for months. Steingart was named Wirtschaftsjournalist des Jahres (Economy journalist of the year) in 2004. His next book, Weltkrieg um Wohlstand. Wie Macht und Reichtum neu verteilt werden (2006) was published in 20 countries. A revised version (The War for Wealth) was published in the United States in 2008. The former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described the book as "a lucid and compelling reality check". In his Spiegel columns, Steingart was a persistent and abrasive critic of U.S. President Barack Obama. [5]

Critical appraisal in established media

Steingart's systematic work with catchy metaphors is a characteristic of his journalism, which pursues a specific agenda. His capricious style makes people and ideas big, small or ridiculous, as is common in social media political journalism. Steingart is a well-integrated, prototypical representative of this layer.

According to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel , hubris is a way of life for Steingart, for whom "it can't be big, fast, powerful, loud enough". This leads to regular scaremongering that can be summed up as "apocalypse daily". [6] Thereby, it sometimes happens that in the heat of the moment he doesn't see the plank in his own eye. In February 2020, for example, he boastfully called for the cancellation of subscriptions to the Süddeutsche Zeitung , the Der Spiegel , the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the rest of the 'serious press', because these newspapers had incorrectly predicted that Donald Trump would lose the 2016 US elections. However, Steingart had predicted the same shortly before the said elections. [7]

Steingart's motto, "100 percent journalism, no fairy tales", is reminiscent of the populism of the self-styled "lateral thinkers" against the "lying press", a pejorative political term, used intermittently since the 19th century in political polemics in Germany, that became popular again in recent years during the Corona crisis and the Pegida demonstrations. [8]

Awards

Books

Related Research Articles

<i>Die Tageszeitung</i> German daily newspaper

Die Tageszeitung, stylized as die tageszeitung and commonly referred to as taz, is a German daily newspaper. It is run as a cooperative – it is administered by its employees and a co-operative of shareholders who invest in a free independent press, rather than to depend on advertising and paywalls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antje Vollmer</span> German politician and academic (1943–2023)

Antje Vollmer was a German Protestant theologian, academic teacher and politician of the Alliance 90/The Greens. She became a member of the Bundestag in 1983 when the Greens first entered the West German parliament, before joining the party in 1985. From 1994 to 2005, she was Vice President of the Bundestag, the first Green in the position. She was a pacifist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Biedenkopf</span> German jurist, academic and politician (1930–2021)

Kurt Hans Biedenkopf was a German jurist, academic teacher and politician of the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) party. He was rector of the Ruhr University Bochum.

<i>Der Tagesspiegel</i> German newspaper

Der Tagesspiegel is a German daily newspaper. It has regional correspondent offices in Washington, D.C., and Potsdam. It is the only major newspaper in the capital to have increased its circulation, now 148,000, since reunification. Der Tagesspiegel is a liberal newspaper that is classified as centrist media in the context of German politics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sahra Wagenknecht</span> German politician (born 1969)

Sahra Wagenknecht is a German politician, economist, author, and publicist. Since 2009 she has been a member of the Bundestag, where until 2023 she represented The Left. From 2015 to 2019, she served as that party's parliamentary co-chair. With a small team of allies, she left the party on 23 October 2023 to found her own party in 2024, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, to contest elections onwards.

<i>Handelsblatt</i> German business newspaper

The Handelsblatt is a German-language business newspaper published in Düsseldorf by Handelsblatt Media Group, formerly known as Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stefan Aust</span> German journalist

Stefan Aust is a German journalist. He was the editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008 and has been the publisher of the conservative leading Die Welt newspaper since 2014 and the paper's editor until December 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kai Diekmann</span> German journalist

Kai Diekmann is a German businessman and former journalist. From 1998 until 2000 he was editor of Welt am Sonntag. From January 2001 to December 2015 he was chief editor of Bild. He is also a member of the executive board of the Turkish daily Hürriyet.

Ferdinand Simoneit was a German journalist, author, professor and World War II veteran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Otte</span> German-American economist and author

Matthias "Max" Otte is an economist, publicist and political activist who holds German and U.S. citizenship. Otte, who has held professorships in Worms, Graz and Erfurt, is currently a fund manager. He has written several bestsellers, mainly on financial policy topics.

The Axel-Springer-Preis is an annually awarded prize. The Award is given to young journalists in the categories print, TV, radio, and online journalism due to the decisions of the Axel-Springer-Akademie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Weidel</span> German politician (born 1979)

Alice Elisabeth Weidel is a German politician who has been serving as co-chairwoman of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party alongside Tino Chrupalla since June 2022. Since October 2017, she has held the position of leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Weidel became a member of the Bundestag (MdB) in the 2017 federal election, where she was the AfD's lead candidate alongside Alexander Gauland. In the 2021 federal election, she once again served as their lead candidate, alongside Tino Chrupalla. From February 2020 to July 2022, Weidel held the position of chairwoman of the AfD state association in Baden-Württemberg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfons Rissberger</span> German entrepreneur (b. 1948)

Alfons Rissberger is a German entrepreneur, business consultant, and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bettina Röhl</span> German journalist and author (born 1962)

Bettina Röhl is a German journalist and author. She is best known for her writings about student radicalism of the 1960s and the terrorist kidnappings that it spawned in West Germany during the early 1970s. Röhl has written extensively about the former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's time as a left-wing militant leader. She has also researched and written at length about her own mother, journalist and Red Army Faction terrorist Ulrike Meinhof. Her assessments of the violence associated with the Red Army Faction in the 1970s are at times intensely critical.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bascha Mika</span> German journalist and publicist

Bascha Mika is a German journalist and publicist. From 1998 to July 2009, she was editor-in-chief of Die Tageszeitung and has held the same post at Frankfurt Rundschau since April 2014. At Die Tageszeitung, Mika was the only female editor-in-chief of a national newspaper in Germany.

Rudolf Hickel is a German economist and author. He transferred to the University of Bremen in 1971, accepting the chair in "Finanzwissenschaft" in 1993. Between 2001 and 2009 he served as director of the university's Institute for Labour and Economics. A long standing critic of developments in western Market Capitalism since the 1980s, he has engaged powerfully in the economic debates emerging during the aftermath of the 2007/2008 Financial crisis.

Die Tagespost is a Catholic national weekly published by Johann Wilhelm Naumann Verlag in Würzburg, Germany. It bears the subtitle Katholische Wochenzeitung for politics, society and culture. Until April 1, 1999, it was called Deutsche Tagespost. The paper appeared three times a week, the Saturday edition with slight changes and an addition to the weekly Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Since January 2018, Die Tagespost has been published exclusively as a 32-page weekly newspaper and a paid online edition. According to journalists it is a "right-wing Catholic" newspaper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boris Reitschuster</span>

Boris Reitschuster is a German journalist and author. He is considered an expert on Eastern Europe and became known for his books on contemporary Russia. He was the head of the Moscow bureau of the German weekly FOCUS from 1999 until August 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ute Scheub</span> German journalist and author

Ute Scheub is a German journalist-commentator, political analyst and author. A woman of robust intellect and powerful convictions, she is also sometimes identified as a campaigner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit</span> German judge and politician (1932 – 2023)

Lore Maria Peschel-Gutzeit was a German jurist and politician. Born in Hamburg, she became an advocate for family law, children's rights, and gender equality. As the first female president of a family senate, she served as Senator for Justice in Hamburg and Berlin. She implemented key legislation promoting gender equality. Recognized with the Marie Juchacz Women's Prize in 2019, she continued her legal career until her death in Berlin on 2 September 2023, at the age of 90.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Gabor Steingart (2018). "Die Person". gaborsteingart.com. Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  2. "Newspaper editor sacked for describing Martin Schulz's 'perfect murder'". The Local.de. 9 February 2018. Retrieved 16 December 2018.
  3. Silvera, Ian. "Onboard the world's first media ship". www.news-future.com. Retrieved 18 August 2022.
  4. Silvera, Ian. "Onboard the world's first media ship". www.news-future.com. Retrieved 18 August 2022.
  5. See, for example, "Searching in Vain for the Obama Magic"
    - "US Foreign Policy: Obama's Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage"
    - "West Wing: The End of the Obama Revolution"
    - "The Iowa Fairy Tale: Obama's Victory in Never-Never Land"
    - "West Wing: The Return of Realpolitik"
    - "West Wing: Change You Can't Believe In"
    - "West Wing: Clinton Narrowly Ahead as Obama Fails to Clinch Center Ground"
    - "West Wing : The Other Side of Barack Obama"
    - "West Wing: Democrats Divided by an Obama-Shaped Wedge"
    - "Obama's Mistakes: Chancellor Merkel Visits the Debt President"
  6. "'The Pioneer' von Gabor Steingart: Kein alternatives Medium", David Kulessa, publizissimus, Fachschaftsrat Publizistik, Universität Mainz, 14 February 2021
  7. "Gabor Steingarts Morning Briefing, eskalierende Metaphern", Matthias Dell, Deutschlandfunk, 22 April 2020
  8. "Gabor Steingarts 'Media Pioneer' Redaktionsstart unter genauer Beobachtung", Vera Linß, Deutschlandfunk, 18 May 2020
Articles by Steingart
Articles on Steingart
Pictures