LETTER FROM VIENNA
“The director can rule out 100% that there was manipulated polls or lenient media coverage in exchange for advertisements. [Dans cette affaire], we are victims and not criminals. “ Wednesday October 13, it is with this small insert entitled “Explanations” that Wolfgang Fellner, director of the Austrian press group Österreich, defended himself, in his own columns, from the infamous accusations of ” Bribery “ and of ” corruption “ hovering over him, his brother Helmuth and all of their media in the context of the “advertising affair” which cost Chancellor Sebastian Kurz his post on Saturday, October 9.
This box was published just below the daily article Österreich and its free counterpart Oe24 recounting the arrest, the day before, of the director of the polling institute Research Affairs at the heart of the scandal. Neither the article nor the sidebar made it clear to the reader that this institute has in fact been a partner of the two publications for years, and that its director is specifically suspected of having provided them with surveys financed by the taxpayer, in part. “Rigged” to favor the leader of the conservative party ÖVP. All this in exchange for an advertising campaign from the Ministry of Finance, assessed by the anti-corruption prosecution at at least 1.3 million euros …
If the affair brutally cut the career of Sebastian Kurz, forced to resign Saturday, October 9 at the age of 35, it also shakes like never the group of the “Fellner brothers” by bringing to light the contested methods of these two sixties, papivores of the tabloid press.
Known for having created, at the end of the 1960s, a school newspaper which then became the largest circulation of the youth press in the country – it was sold at a high price at the end of the 1980s -, the two brothers then founded News, a kind of Paris Match Austrian, another publishing success, then launched, in 2006, the Österreich group, whose flagship, Österreich, is loosely inspired by the popular American daily USA Today, and intended to attack the empire of Krone Zeitung, the most powerful of the European tabloids with a penetration rate of nearly 25% of the readers of this country of 8.8 million inhabitants.
Capture of public money
With their enticing titles, their short articles and their large photos, as well as their ambiguous relations with political power, the two titles of the “boulevard press” – as we say in German – share the same readers and engage in a merciless media and judicial war. The two newspapers are also a family affair… Faced with the Dichand couple, owner of Krone, Wolfgang Fellner, 67, is associated with his younger brother Helmut, in the more opaque role of “Responsible for commercial affairs”, and his son Nikki, editor.
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