Newly leaked documents reveal that the paper’s incoming German owner has made support for Israel a formal editorial principle. It confirms what our previous investigation first exposed: the Telegraph is no longer a newspaper — it is a conduit for ideological warfare. And as new reporting shows, the UK government approved this deal after blocking a rival bid from the UAE over fears of foreign influence. The irony is staggering.
It is now mandatory to support Israel for journalists at a British newspaper. You have read that correctly.
A leaked letter sent by the new owner of the Daily Telegraph — the German-based media giant Axel Springer SE — reveals that journalists are now formally expected to support Israel’s right to exist. The British Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared this takeover. And Mathias Döpfner, Axel Springer’s CEO, has written to Telegraph staff outlining what he calls his commitment to the paper.
He insists the values of the Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer — dubbed Germany’s Rupert Murdoch — are aligned. They are, he says: freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech.
He goes further. Axel Springer, the company, he explains, “is guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in what he says are “the essentials” — core values to which we are firmly committed. There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism.” Only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”
And yet, having invoked freedom of speech as a foundational principle, he insists these essentials “are not partisan, but rather define a sociopolitical framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”
Döpfner then sets out these essentials:
- We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law and democracy.
- We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of anti-semitism.
- We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.
- We uphold the principles of a free market economy.
- We reject political and religious extremism as well as forms of discrimination.
Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits. It is number two. Second in those so-called essentials.
Döpfner says that editorial independence will be protected, “including from pressure by politicians, celebrities or advertisers.” He says: “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression.”
But the description of the essentials is Orwellian. It is not reconcilable. Surely to argue that these tenets create the conditions for maximum journalistic freedom while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state? Out of 193 United Nations member states, only one is singled out in this way. No state has the “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination — a right denied in this case by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonization and genocide.
A Telegraph journalist put it bluntly: “To be firmly told by our new parent company’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning. It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.”
As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.
In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes — from occupation and colonization to apartheid and now mass destruction in Gaza. It is also telling what is not said. The essentials do not prohibit racism in general despite later “rejecting all forms of discrimination.” There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism. Instead, opposition to anti-semitism is fused directly with support for Israel’s right to exist. That conflation matters because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between anti-semitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.
So how exactly might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of anti-semitism”? There are very strong clues.
The Takeover Battle: How Axel Springer Won
To understand how the Telegraph arrived at this moment, one must trace the three-year ownership crisis that preceded the Axel Springer deal.
The Barclay Family Collapse
The trouble began in 2023, when the Barclay family — which had owned the Telegraph for nearly two decades — defaulted on more than £1 billion in debt. The paper was seized by its lenders, Lloyd’s Banking Group, triggering a frantic search for new owners. For a newspaper that had long styled itself as the voice of Conservative England, the sudden vacuum of ownership was unprecedented.
The Abu Dhabi Bid That Nearly Happened
The most controversial bidder to emerge was RedBird IMI — a joint venture between the US-based RedBird Capital and Abu Dhabi’s International Media Investments (IMI). Between 2023 and 2025, RedBird IMI bought the Telegraph’s debt and attempted to convert it into ownership. For a time, it came very close to taking control.
But the UK government intervened. New rules were introduced to prevent foreign state influence in British media, and the UAE connection triggered profound press freedom concerns. Abu Dhabi’s record on media censorship — its jailing of dissidents, its control over domestic outlets, its use of state-owned media as an instrument of foreign policy — made the prospect of a Gulf monarchy owning one of Britain’s most influential newspapers politically untenable.
Politicians across parties raised alarms. Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, said the UAE “should not be allowed” to acquire the paper. Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, warned about “improper meddling” during the process. Peers and MPs spoke of risks to “independent journalism” and national media sovereignty.
There were also reports that a partner linked to the Abu Dhabi fund had pushed for job cuts and scaling back editorial investment — reinforcing fears that the ownership would not be passive.
The Unspoken Fear: A Shift Away from Pro-Israel Orthodoxy
While rarely stated bluntly in official language, the underlying concern was geopolitical. The Telegraph is historically strongly pro-Israel and aligned with UK conservative politics. Critics of the UAE-linked deal worried that ownership tied to Abu Dhabi — a major Arab state actor — could shift the paper’s editorial tone on Middle East policy and Israel-Palestine coverage. Even when not explicitly framed as “pro-Arab,” the concern was about soft power influence and alignment with Gulf foreign policy interests.
This is why the issue became tied to national security and foreign policy, not just business. The UK government escalated it into a legislative issue, not just a regulatory one. In late 2025, RedBird IMI abandoned its bid. The Telegraph was put back up for sale.
The Daily Mail Bid and Axel Springer’s Victory
A rival bid emerged from the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), but it was Axel Springer’s higher offer that ultimately won out. On March 7, 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that Axel Springer had struck a $770 million deal for the Telegraph. By April, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy had approved the takeover, saying there were no sufficient grounds to block it on public-interest or foreign influence grounds — though she left open the option of later intervention.
Axel Springer promised editorial independence, investment in digital expansion (especially in the US), and maintaining the Telegraph’s “distinct editorial voice.”
Why Axel Springer Was Seen as More Acceptable
In contrast to the UAE-backed bid, Axel Springer was viewed as politically safer: a private European company, not state-backed, already embedded in Western media ecosystems through its ownership of Politico and Business Insider. Its ideological stance was clearer and more familiar to British conservatives.
Crucially, Axel Springer has an internal corporate ethos that includes support for Israel’s right to exist and alignment with Western alliances. This actually reassured some critics who had opposed the UAE bid. The irony is staggering: a bid was blocked over fears of foreign influence that might shift the Telegraph away from its pro-Israel stance, while a bid was approved that mandates pro-Israel support as a formal condition of employment.
The Telegraph sale became a test case for media sovereignty in the UK. The Abu Dhabi-backed bid collapsed primarily due to concerns over state influence, press freedom, and potential geopolitical bias. Axel Springer ultimately succeeded because it posed fewer national security concerns and aligned more clearly with existing Western media norms. But as the leaked letter now reveals, “alignment with Western media norms” in this case means mandatory adherence to a political position on a single foreign state.
Who Is Mathias Döpfner?
To understand what the Telegraph is becoming, one must understand the man now holding its leash.
The late Axel Springer, the mogul who used to run this company, himself declared: “It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.” He further added: “The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy wherever and whenever it can be provided — in the European community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.” He described this as a German duty.
Under Döpfner, who took the helm in 2002, that commitment has deepened into something far more militant.
In June 2021, when employees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Döpfner responded: “I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here after anti-semitic demonstrations should look for a new job.” He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May — an operation that killed more than 250 Palestinians, including dozens of children.
In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV, part of the Axel Springer empire, was dismissed. He said it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refused to comment on what it said were individual personnel matters.
That same year, a leaked internal email reportedly summarized Döpfner’s political worldview with the phrase “Zionism über alles” — Zionism above all.
He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding massive, unstinting political, financial, and military support.
On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed that a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for Hamas’s actions. He argued that an “almost global wave of anti-semitism” suddenly showed its ugly face, which he described as a shock — despite knowing, as he says, that it is “here and there well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as anti-Zionism or wokeism or whatever.”
And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok. He said, concretely: “More than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics, and only 50,000 — something 53,000 — posts basically standing by Israel.” #FreePalestine, he argued, was a kind of pro-Hamas topic.
When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was surprising that Israel “has not been celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed the public response is “dominated by anti-Israel propaganda.”
“The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired,” he wrote, “but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly anti-semitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterized not only by racist undertones but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.”
In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with anti-semitism.
A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th, which included a first responder who testified before the Knesset, the Israeli legislature, that he had seen the severed skulls of three children. The claims that children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked. He went on to write that “justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews” and that as a result, “instead of an obvious global wave of compassion, solidarity, a global wave of coldheartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-semitism has emerged.”
He is not engaging there with the war crimes committed by Israel or with the genocide that a consensus of genocide scholars has established — including by multiple Israeli scholars of genocide. The “coldheartedness” he decries is, in fact, a moral response to the mass slaughter of countless Palestinians and Lebanese people and other victims of the Israeli state. But Döpfner mentions nothing of that. Instead, he speaks only of anti-semitism.
The piece further criticized the German government — Israel’s most loyal European defender — for massively restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision “means that from now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to condition.”
We can see there how he is using the concept of Israel’s right to exist to attack, in this case, even a right-wing German government curtailing arms sales on the basis of war crimes being committed by the Israeli state and the legal obligation on states not to provide weapons for war crimes. The German state is nonetheless up to its neck in complicity with Israel’s war crimes. But one can see here how the concept of the “right to exist” is being used.
He also described the recognition of Palestinian statehood as “a reward for the barbarism of October 7th.”
A Pattern of Conflation: Anti-Semitism and Critique of Israel
Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into the German tabloid Bild — a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE — headlined “The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specializing in Anti-Palestinian Incitement.” Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a terrorist, that it had denied that journalist’s family in Gaza, and that it published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
Al Jazeera also reported that Bild had consistently demonized pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labeling them as “mobs,” “Israel haters,” and “anti-semites.” Bild has described student protesters in the United States as “Judenhasser Studenten” — Jew-hater students — even though those protesters include Jewish students.
We should also note the atmosphere in Germany in general, in which anti-semitism is widely conflated with critique of Israel and its crimes, to the extent that Jewish people there have been repeatedly denounced, deplatformed, and arrested.
Axel Springer’s outlets have repeatedly singled out Jewish critics of Israel. Bild argued that Jewish American photographer Nan Goldin “misused the opening of her retrospective at the New National Gallery to level serious accusations against Germany and Israel supported by pro-Palestinian activists.” Another article attacked Deborah Feldman, a Jewish American German writer who has spoken out about how the German government ignores the way, as she puts it, “dissenting Jews in Germany are being thrown under the bus as they are in Israel.”
A piece in Bild said of her: “Her political views are close to conspiracy theories. In Germany, one is not allowed to say what one wants. The police are infiltrated by right-wing extremists and the federal republic is preventing peace in the Middle East — anti-semitic subtext because it obeys the all-powerful Israel lobby. This is roughly the worldview of the author who years ago had a Netflix hit with her autobiographically inspired bestseller ‘Unorthodox.'”
In other words, Bild falsely suggested that a Jewish writer holds anti-semitic views because of her opinions about Israel.
This is the intellectual environment that Axel Springer has cultivated. And it is now being imported, wholesale, into British journalism.
Business and Politics: The Israeli Connection
Axel Springer’s interests in Israel are not merely ideological. The company acquired Israeli classified platform Yad2 for 165 million euros more than a decade ago. Yad2 is involved in Israel’s property market and reportedly advertises properties in illegal settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank — settlements considered unlawful under international law.
Last October, the Israeli President Isaac Herzog presented Döpfner with the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor, alongside Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American business tycoon who donated more than $100 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Israel’s justification for Döpfner’s award was that he is “a brave voice against anti-semitism and a staunch supporter of Israel,” demonstrating “unprecedented solidarity with Israel during the current war.”
President Herzog of Israel incited genocide against the Palestinian people back in October 2023 when he declared of Gaza: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true. This rhetoric about civilians who are not aware and not involved, it is absolutely not true.”
Döpfner received his medal from a man accused of inciting genocide. The symbolism is not subtle.
The Beirut Airport Fabrication: A Case Study in Complicity
Our previous investigation highlighted a particularly egregious example of the Telegraph’s editorial collapse. In June 2024, the paper published an anonymously sourced article accusing Hezbollah of hiding weapons inside Beirut’s international airport. The piece sparked international outrage and was swiftly discredited after Lebanon’s transport minister opened the airport for inspection by diplomats and journalists. No evidence supported the paper’s claims.
Observers described the article as an example of “narrative laundering” — a tactic where militarized propaganda is seeded through reputable outlets to legitimize potential war crimes, such as bombing civilian infrastructure. Critics said the article could have provided Israel with cover to target Beirut’s airport, just as it had in 2006.
That the Telegraph would publish such a piece without transparent sourcing or editorial restraint was emblematic of its new role. And under Axel Springer, such episodes will not be aberrations. They will be policy.
The Secret Briefings They Didn’t Need
In 2025, a Declassified UK investigation uncovered that Israeli officials — including former IDF Chief Aviv Kohavi — held private meetings with UK media leaders to influence coverage of Gaza. Senior figures from the BBC, The Guardian, FT, and Sky News attended.
Conspicuously absent? The Daily Telegraph.
According to analysts, the Telegraph was not invited because it didn’t need persuading. Its editorial line was already so closely aligned with Israeli interests that lobbying was redundant.
Under editor Chris Evans, who has led the paper since 2014, the Telegraph has repeatedly published op-eds denying Israeli culpability in civilian deaths, accusing critics of antisemitism, and defending Israel’s conduct with unwavering loyalty. In 2018, the paper came under fire for a headline describing George Soros’s anti-Brexit funding as a “secret plot” — a move widely condemned as antisemitic. Evans defended the coverage internally, revealing the ideological tightrope the Telegraph walks when discussing Jewish and Israeli topics: deeply ideological but cloaked in claims of objectivity.
Now, with Axel Springer’s ownership, that tightrope has been replaced by a straightjacket.
Silencing the Reader: The Telegraph’s Systematic Comment Ban on Gaza Coverage
The Telegraph’s transformation into a one-way propaganda channel is not limited to its ownership and editorial mandates. A comprehensive content analysis published by the Al Jazeera Journalism Review in October 2025 has revealed a systematic and deliberate pattern of comment suppression on the newspaper’s Instagram platform. The study, which digitally scraped more than two thousand Instagram posts uploaded between October 7, 2023, and March 30, 2025, found that the Telegraph disabled comment sections on approximately 40 percent of posts containing the keywords Gaza, Israel, or Palestine.
This is not a technical glitch or an occasional moderation decision. It is a deliberate editorial strategy to control the narrative and divert it in favour of Israel. By turning off the comment feature on Instagram posts — especially those concerning opinion articles written about the Gaza war — the Telegraph has altered its social media account into a one-way platform without allowing democratic engagements or alternative opinions.
The quantitative findings are stark. Out of more than 2,000 posts, around 240 contained at least one of the three keywords. More than 90 of these posts had their comment sections disabled. In October 2023 — the first month of the war — 43 out of 44 war-related Instagram posts were uploaded with comments disabled. In November 2023, more than 90 percent of posts containing related keywords appeared with comment sections turned off.
A word cloud analysis of captions from Instagram posts with disabled comment sections reveals the newspaper’s priorities. The term ‘Israel’ appeared most frequently, mentioned over 150 times. ‘Gaza’ was mentioned around 118 times, ‘Hamas’ 94 times, while ‘Palestine’ appeared only 38 times. While ‘Israeli’ was mentioned 65 times in the captions, the term ‘Palestinian’ was mentioned only 19 times in total.
Perhaps most tellingly, despite the October 7 Hamas attack being the leading news story at the time, the Telegraph did not upload a single Instagram post about the attack on that day. The attack was considered the biggest security failure for Israel in its history. This omission can be considered a tactic to avoid immediate public discussion of that failure on their platform.
The earliest post without a comment section was published by the Telegraph on October 7, titled “Israel at ‘war,’ says Netanyahu.” Within a week, the Telegraph uploaded to Instagram two articles by its own defence and foreign affairs editor, Con Coughlin. The comment sections were disabled on both posts, each openly calling for revenge for the attack on Israel.
On October 11, 2023, the Telegraph uploaded an aerial picture showing the bodies of those killed on October 7, with the caption: “They chop the heads of women and children.” However, forensic investigations carried out by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, along with fact-checks by FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, confirmed that the story of babies being beheaded was false. Since the comment section was disabled on the post, no one could raise the issue under the post, nor has the Telegraph withdrawn the post.
By turning off the comment feature, the outlet succeeded in shutting down comments questioning the logic of its framing. Even in posts showing Gaza’s devastation, the outlet muted public response. On October 12, the Telegraph posted a gallery of images of the devastation happening in Gaza by the bombardments of Israel. Yet the comment section was disabled, shielding them from backlash over their double standards — defending the war in an opinion piece while posting images of Gaza’s devastation on the very same day.
In later months, even posts describing the critical conditions in Gaza or showing emotive photos of Gazan children appeared with the comment feature turned off. Opening the comment section would have helped readers raise questions around the ethics of showing images of suffering while refusing to hold Israel accountable — as happened with the BBC and CNN. For example, on February 27, the BBC posted an image of a Red Cross ambulance carrying Palestinians released by Israel. In the comment section, many users questioned the BBC’s framing. One user asked, “Why is one side called prisoners and the other hostages?” Another wrote: “I cannot believe they keep using such headlines! How about going to the Palestinian hostages and asking about their experiences? Where’s your journalism then?” Similarly, more than a hundred people commented under that BBC Instagram post, questioning its bias.
CNN also faced backlash in the comment section when it uploaded a video to Instagram with the caption: “Israel has targeted Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar in a strike on a hospital in southern Gaza.” The top comment on that post read: “YOU CANNOT TARGET HOSPITALS! Period. (Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention; Articles 19 & 21 of Additional Protocol I.) Even if a specific person (like a combatant or commander) is believed to be inside a hospital, the attacking force must distinguish between civilians and combatants. STOP ACTING LIKE THIS WAS OK OR NORMAL. YOUR CAPTION IS BAD JOURNALISM.”
The Telegraph, by selectively disabling comments, has systematically suppressed the voice of dissent and eliminated any form of alternative dialogue or narrative that might sprout in the comment section.
Most of the Telegraph’s opinion articles about the Gaza war were uploaded to Instagram without the comment feature. The Telegraph’s first opinion article, published on October 8, was titled “Punish Iran for this despicable attack on Israeli civilians.” Bringing up Iran from nowhere within a day after Hamas’s attack alludes to the larger narrative the outlet wanted to frame. Multiple opinion articles were written against Iran in October 2023.
On October 13, the Telegraph uploaded another article on Iran with the title “Iran’s Sinister Plan Is in Danger of Succeeding.” The article, penned by former secretary of state for defence Ben Wallace, was uploaded without the comment section, which deterred readers from registering their opinion.
Throughout October, the Telegraph continued uploading posters of opinion articles framing Hamas and Iran as a real threat to the world while covering up the military actions of the IDF in Gaza. On October 14, it uploaded “Hamas’ Apocalypse Has Crafted a New World Order” by Peter Frankopan. On October 15, it shared “The West Is Truly Lost If It Cannot See Hamas for What It Really Is” by Daniel Hannan. On October 18, it uploaded “Hamas’ Attack Was Only Motivated by Hate” by Vernon Bogdanor.
On October 22, the Telegraph uploaded another opinion piece to Instagram titled “How Hamas Is Winning the Propaganda War Against Israel,” criticizing acceptance of the Palestinian cause (often dubbed as support for Hamas). Similar to other opinion articles about Gaza, this article was published without a comment feature, likely to avoid criticism for overlooking the mass murders committed by the IDF, which kept appearing in the headlines of many mainstream media outlets.
In November, the Telegraph uploaded a carousel post accusing Telegram of being used by Hamas for propaganda. Instead of using the word “Telegram,” the post was titled, “How an app run by Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg became an organ of Hamas propaganda.” In its fourth slide, it clearly mentioned that the propaganda was being carried out by highlighting the civilian casualties in Gaza.
The most obvious anti-Palestinian frame on Instagram appeared after the UN Secretary-General’s call for a ceasefire. The Telegraph published an article by Hamish de Bretton-Gordon attacking António Guterres. They uploaded a photo of Guterres with the headline ‘UN Secretary-General Must Resign.’ The Telegraph also disabled the comment section, which would likely have been flooded with criticism of their attack on Guterres and strong support for the UN’s call to end the war.
In November, when the Israeli army was continuously targeting hospitals in Gaza under the guise of “targeted attacks,” the Telegraph uploaded an article by Arsen Ostrovsky titled “Hamas are cruelly turning hospitals into targets.” By framing the story solely around alleged actions by Hamas, the article implicitly justified the ongoing strikes on civilian hospitals. Disabling the comments saved the outlet from criticism from humanitarian workers and others who might have condemned its overt support of the genocide. In the same month, the Telegraph published another opinion article by Dominic Nichols titled “Where are the Hamas fighters?” Both articles were uploaded without the comment feature, likely to prevent criticism by readers over covering up the atrocities carried out by the IDF in Gaza.
The Telegraph never posted the number of people killed in Gaza in any of its Instagram uploads. In October 2023, it kept its feed focused on emotive articles about the Israeli hostages, even as thousands had lost their lives in Gaza by the end of the month. The emotive stories of Israeli hostages were uploaded to Instagram without the comment option, likely to suppress calls to show the Palestinians arrested by the Israelis and killed in Israeli bombardment — as happened under the comment section of the BBC.
In January 2024, the Telegraph did not upload a single Instagram post related to the Gaza-Israel war, and the following months also saw a decline in its coverage. There are around a dozen posts describing the critical conditions in Gaza, some citing international organizations such as the UN. In a couple of its posts, the Telegraph uploaded photos of Gazan children with captions, but the commenting feature was still not enabled. Allowing comments would have enabled readers to question the ethics of showing Gaza’s suffering while avoiding Israel’s accountability, and to challenge the double standard of supporting Israel yet lamenting Gaza’s destruction.
A remarkable spike in the number of posts can be observed in October 2024, during the first anniversary of the Hamas attack. Surprisingly, many of them were uploaded with the commenting feature enabled, except for an opinion article by Daniel Hannan, a picture story from Gaza, and an Instagram gallery of photos from Gaza. The title of the picture story uploaded without the comment facility is a quote from a mother in Gaza: “We are paying for a war we never wanted.” Even after a year and thousands of deaths, the Telegraph continued to frame Israel’s actions as a response to Hamas’s conduct. By selectively disabling comments, the outlet appeared to manage the narrative it presented while limiting public engagement and calls for Israel’s accountability.
On the second anniversary of October 7, the Telegraph posted multiple stories about Israelis killed by Hamas. While the framing emphasized Israeli victims, the majority of comments expressed solidarity with Palestinians killed by Israel and condemned the ongoing genocide. Its Instagram post titled “Hamas murdered my son on Oct 7. Why won’t they give his body back?” received 248 comments, with more than 90 percent voicing support for Palestine or denouncing Israel’s actions, many also questioning the Telegraph’s bias. One user wrote: “Israel killed thousands of babies, children, and innocent civilians… Palestine shall be free.”
By disabling comments at the outset of the war, the Telegraph systematically silenced perspectives that challenged its framing. This suppression muted public calls to end the genocide and lift the siege of Gaza, effectively helping shield Israel from accountability. And now, with Axel Springer’s ownership, such practices will not merely continue — they will be embedded in the newspaper’s corporate DNA.
A Political Turning Point — And the Media’s Reckoning
Our previous investigation noted a seismic political shift unfolding in Britain in May 2025. For the first time, a growing number of British politicians began to publicly turn against Israel — not out of newfound moral clarity, but out of fear. Fear that their continued support for Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, which by that point had killed over 35,000 Palestinians, could land them on the wrong side of international law.
An investigation published by Greatreporter on May 7, 2025, revealed that members of Parliament were now speaking of potential sanctions, recognising Palestinian statehood, and even invoking the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe the destruction in Gaza. Behind this dramatic U-turn lies a rising awareness of legal culpability. The prospect of international criminal proceedings — potentially even appearances before the Hague — for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity has cast a long shadow over Westminster.
That investigation asked a critical question: If politicians are scrambling to shield themselves from legal consequences, will the UK’s media follow suit? And will the Telegraph, which has spent the past year defending every Israeli airstrike and discrediting Palestinian accounts of suffering, attempt to backtrack in order to preserve what remains of its journalistic credibility?
Given the leaked letter from Axel Springer, such a pivot now seems impossible. The Telegraph cannot backtrack, because its new owner has locked the editorial direction in place. The paper will not pivot. It will only double down.
From Newspaper of Record to Political Tool: A Historical Perspective
Founded in 1855, The Telegraph was for much of its history a pillar of British media — celebrated for its investigative reporting, international coverage, and influence over public debate. But its legacy has been eroded by an ideological drift that has turned it into a vehicle for narrow political interests, especially in the context of Israel-Palestine coverage.
As far back as 1946, following the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel, The Telegraph focused more on British loss and political implications than the broader terror campaign by Zionist militias. In 1948, during the Nakba — the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians — the displacement received little empathetic attention; instead, the focus remained on the creation of the Israeli state and its geopolitical implications. Such coverage laid the groundwork for a pattern of reporting that increasingly ignored Palestinian suffering and consistently aligned with Israeli state interests.
During the most recent Gaza war (2024–2025), the Telegraph again distinguished itself — not through independent reporting, but through parroting the Israeli government’s framing. It ran headlines that questioned casualty figures from Palestinian sources while emphasizing Israeli victimhood. One notable article dismissed Hamas’s claim that 70% of Gaza’s dead were women and children as “demonstrably false” — a term loaded with ideological intent but lacking transparency in sourcing.
The paper simultaneously launched an aggressive campaign against the BBC, accusing it of over 1,500 breaches of editorial standards in its Gaza coverage, painting itself as the lone beacon of truth amid a supposedly biased media landscape. But critics argue that this self-righteous stance masks a much deeper problem: The Telegraph is no longer a neutral actor in the conflict. It is, increasingly, a partisan organ in Israel’s global information war.
To be clear, the Telegraph has already got a partisan pro-Israel orientation, publishing multiple pieces justifying Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gaza and monstering those who have stood against it. This takeover embeds pro-Israel bias into the newspaper’s very fabric. Its new owners are zealously pro-Israel and have repeatedly conflated anti-semitism with critique of Israel.
The Orwellian Contradiction: Freedom of Speech Versus Mandated Loyalty
Döpfner has invoked freedom of speech as a foundational principle. He has promised pluralism and debate. But the description of the essentials is Orwellian. It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for maximum journalistic freedom while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.
They claim that freedom of speech is a core value. The truth is that Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism. And we can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes — from occupation and colonization to apartheid and now mass destruction in Gaza. It is also telling what is not said in the Axel Springer essentials. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia or anti-Arab racism. Instead, opposition to anti-semitism is fused directly with support for Israel’s right to exist. That conflation matters because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between anti-semitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.
Döpfner has demonstrated how he interprets “oppose all forms of anti-semitism” in practice. When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, he declared it was surprising that Israel “has not been celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed the public response is dominated by “anti-Israel propaganda.” The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions, he wrote, “are not admired, but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly anti-semitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterized not only by racist undertones but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.”
In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with anti-semitism.
He has also criticized the German government — Israel’s most loyal European defender — for massively restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he wrote that decision “means that from now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to condition.” Here we see how the concept of “Israel’s right to exist” is being used to attack even a right-wing German government for curtailing arms sales on the basis of war crimes and the legal obligation on states not to provide weapons for war crimes. The German state remains up to its neck in complicity with Israel’s war crimes, but Döpfner’s framing reveals the rhetorical function of the “right to exist” doctrine: it is a weapon to silence any conditionality, any accountability, any criticism.
He has also described the recognition of Palestinian statehood as “a reward for the barbarism of October 7th.”
The Media’s Complicity — And What Comes Next
In the age of hybrid warfare, truth is often the first casualty. The decline of the Telegraph into a politically aligned outlet has real-world consequences. It legitimizes violence, erases victims, and misleads the public at precisely the moment when clear-eyed reporting is most needed.
The Telegraph once stood as a pillar of British journalism. But its legacy has been eroded by an ideological drift that has turned it into a vehicle for narrow political interests. The Axel Springer takeover does not create that problem. It merely codifies it — and, as the leaked letter confirms, makes support for Israel a condition of employment.
The paper’s new owner claims that freedom of speech is a core value. But the truth is that Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism — conflating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism, deplatforming dissenting voices, and now, in the case of the Telegraph, writing a political loyalty test into the company’s founding charter.
Britain has lost not just a newspaper, but a historical institution. And in doing so, it has lost part of the infrastructure that once allowed the public to question power rather than echo it.
As Gaza burns and international scrutiny of Israeli actions intensifies, the Telegraph offers no independent verification, no critical distance — only unwavering repetition of a single narrative. The leaked letter from Mathias Döpfner confirms what our previous investigation first exposed: the paper is no longer a newspaper. It is a mouthpiece.
And a mouthpiece cannot ask questions. It can only speak the lines it has been given.
The UK government approved this deal after blocking a rival bid from the UAE over fears of foreign influence. The irony is that the approved buyer comes with a far more explicit political mandate — one that is now binding on every journalist in the Telegraph’s newsroom. The question for British democracy is no longer whether the Telegraph has been captured. It is whether anyone in power has the will to admit it.
This feature builds on previous reporting, including “How The Daily Telegraph Became a Mouthpiece for Zionism and Lost Its Credibility” (R Powell, May 8, 2025), and incorporates newly leaked correspondence from Axel Springer SE, as well as reporting from The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Al Jazeera Journalism Review content analysis (Mohammed Ramees, October 9, 2025).
