Altmaier's advisory council calls for "disciplining the press

The Young Digital Economy Advisory Board believes the media is to blame for bad IPOs. Therefore, the state should intervene in the freedom of the press.

Who is to blame when the IPO of a start-up does not go as well as hoped? For the Advisory Board Young Digital Economy, which advises Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU), the media is also to blame. As the Handelsblatt first reported, the panel published a position paper titled "IPOs of German Startups" on the ministry's website. Among other things, it says there is "IPO and new-economy bashing" in the press. The state should ensure "balanced reporting". One demand in the catalogue of measures: "Discipline the press to provide factual, correct and complete information". The free media should also be obliged to report on small IPOs. Internet forums should be obliged to disclose the clear names of bloggers. As an example, the panel cites Delivery Hero's IPO, which was allegedly "consistently ripped apart by the financial press as overrated".

The German Journalists Association (DJV) criticized the demands of the advisory body as "completely absurd". "The demands of the advisory board to the address of the media testify to complete ignorance of journalism and its tasks in democracy," reads a statement by the DJV on Twitter. Altmaier called for the immediate removal of the paper from the ministry's website. "Freedom of the press is an outstanding fundamental right that we are committed to protecting," he wrote on Twitter. "The position paper of the Advisory Council young digital economy, was as little known to me as its publication on the homepage."

The advisory board includes 29 people from the startup and investor world, including Alexander von Frankenberg, managing director of High-Tech Gründerfonds, Lea-Sophie Cramer, founder of Amorelie, and investor Christoph Gerlinger. "This is of course nonsense and NOT the position of the advisory board," explains advisory board chairman Christian Vollmann, founder of Nebenan.de, on LinkedIn. "Here we made an internal mistake and published a preliminary working version instead of the final paper." Vollmann has not yet explained how the demand to restrict press freedom got into the preliminary paper. The position paper can no longer be found on the website - neither the preliminary version nor the final one.