Politico owner says his email asking colleagues to ‘pray’ for Trump was done in jest

Former president represented windfall for media companies

Another media executive is walking back his remarks after making a potentially revealing comment about the presidency of Donald Trump and what it meant for the news business.

Mathias Döpfner, owner of Politico parent company Axel Springer SE, initially denied to The Washington Post that he had asked his colleagues in an email sent late in the 2020 election season whether they wanted to “pray” for Mr Trump to be reelected.

But when confronted with the email itself, he “allowed a glimmer of recognition”, according to the newspaper, and admitted sending the email before claiming that the line in question was a joke.

Mr Döpfner probably sent the email “as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump”, he claimed to the Post.

The Independent has reached out for further comment from Politico and Axel Springer SE.

But even if he meant some irony with the statement, it still echoed other frank assessments of the 45th president’s uplifting effects on the news industry and its profits. A number of other major executives in the industry, like ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker, have offered similar takes on how Mr Trump’s political career has attracted audiences and how that was mishandled by some organisations in 2016 when many experts argue Mr Trump was given a larger-than-fair share of media attention as companies chased ratings and viewership.

“Donald Trump has made American journalism great again,” Mr Zucker quipped to an audience in 2017.

Others have said basically the same.

“The Trump presidency for the news business — literally the business — has been very good,” said Joseph Kahn, now executive editor of The New York Times, the same year.

That dynamic changed somewhat in 2021, when the realities of the significance of former Mr Trump and his “Maga” movement became clear after the bloody siege of Congress by his supporters. Mr Trump was kicked off both Facebook and Twitter, two platforms that had been reshaped significantly by his influence, while legacy media organisations took a second look at how they were covering the ex-president and would do so going forward as he plots a potential 2024 run.

But stories and coverage of Mr Trump remain top traffic-getters for media brands across the political spectrum, even with him out of the White House.

That same success has not been been replicated by the former president himself, however, as he has sought in his post-presidency social media exile to build his own Twitter clone from scratch in a bid to challenge existing giants in the field. Fox Business Network reported in August that the company is allegedly late in making more than $1m in payments to internet infrastructure firm RightForge and is declining in popularity overall, according to online tools for analysing web traffic.

Mr Trump attacked that report as “fake news” at the time, and claimed that traditional news organisations were “working overtime to criticize and demean it”.

“Actually, many of the big guns in Washington, D.C., are fighting to stop the TRUTH but, they won’t be successful,” added Mr Trump in a post on the site last month. “They are going after the outside financial company, and virtually anybody that walks and breaths, but that won’t do it.”