Altmaier's advisory board calls for "disciplining the press"

The "Young Digital Economy" advisory board believes that the media are to blame for poor IPOs. The state should therefore intervene in the freedom of the press.

Who is to blame if a start-up's IPO does not go as well as hoped? For the Young Digital Economy Advisory Board, which advises Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU), the media is also to blame. As the Handelsblatt first reported, the committee published a position paper entitled "IPOs of German start-ups" on the ministry's website. Among other things, it states that there is "IPO and new economy bashing" in the press. The state should ensure "balanced reporting". One demand in the list of measures: "Disciplining 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 real names of bloggers. As an example, the committee cites the IPO of Delivery Hero, which was allegedly "consistently torn apart by the financial press as overrated".

The German Journalists' Association (DJV) criticized the advisory body's demands as "completely absurd". "The advisory board's demands to the media show a complete lack of knowledge of journalism and its role in democracy," reads a DJV statement on Twitter. Altmaier demanded the immediate removal of the paper from the ministry's website. "Freedom of the press is an outstanding fundamental right that we are obliged to protect," he wrote on Twitter. "I was just as unaware of the position paper of the Young Digital Economy Advisory Board as I was of its publication on the website."

The advisory board is made up of 29 people from the start-up 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. "We made an internal mistake here and published a preliminary working version instead of the final paper." Vollmann has not yet explained how the demand to restrict press freedom ended up in the preliminary paper. The position paper can no longer be found on the website - neither the preliminary version nor the final version.