After becoming aware of the Stasi contacts of the new owner of the Berlin publishing house, Holger Friedrich, the media company wants to prepare the case journalistically. "We will gather facts, we want to see the files - the victims' and the perpetrator's file", write the chief editors of "Berliner Zeitung" and "Berliner Kurier", Jochen Arntz and Elmar Jehn, in the online editions of their leaves under the Heading "In own thing".
The editors will get an idea, consult experts and also talk to people who appear in the files. "Holger Friedrich has expressly assured the editors to support them on this path." The newspapers would report "journalistically clearly and independently," continue Arntz and Jehn.
The Berlin businessman Friedrich and his wife Silke had recently taken over the Berlin publishing house with the "Berliner Zeitung" and the "Berliner Kurier" from the DuMont media group. On Friday it became known that Friedrich in the GDR was temporarily unofficial employee of the Stasi. As the "Welt am Sonntag" reported, he worked under the code name "Peter Bernstein" for the Ministry of State Security (MfS). Accordingly, he reported during his military service at the National People's Army on comrades and burdened them, according to the report, some hard.
Out of an emergency situation
Friedrich himself stated that he had written a handwritten letter of commitment to the Stasi from an emergency situation following an arrest in order to escape a feared prison sentence. He was "not active" for the state security. At the first opportunity he had escaped this emergency situation and then denied cooperation with the Stasi.
In the journalistic review of Friedrich's past, the editorial team also wanted to clarify why the new publisher did not already inform about his Stasi contacts when he bought the publisher. "We'll ask our publisher about it, we want to get to know his motivations, we want to understand how his decision came about," write Arntz and Jehn.
In addition, the editors of the "Berliner Zeitung" responded again to a report by SPIEGEL. The point is that the newspaper had reported on the East German biotech company Centogene without mentioning that Friedrich sits on its supervisory board and according to US Securities and Exchange Commission held in June on a Berlin-based company 3.27 percent of the company.
As the "Berliner Zeitung" now explains, Friedrich had informed the publisher and the editor-in-chief that Centogene was the world market leader in genetic analysis and that its IPO could be a reason to report. "Neither the editor-in-chief nor the two science editors were aware at this time that Holger Friedrich is involved in the company." If that had been different, the editors would have included this information in the article, "it said in the statement.
In the future, the editors will ensure transparency and check in reporting whether business interests of the entrepreneur couple Friedrich or the media company are affected.
The recently employed publisher of the "Berliner Zeitung", Michael Maier, had commented critically on the case in an interview with the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (Monday edition): "It was wrong not to mention that the publisher sits on the supervisory board was unknown to me and the editors, and the young publishers have understood by now that there are certain rules of the game that are best meticulously met. "
