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Before the publisher Axel Springer honored billionaire Peter Thiel last week, more than 120 staffers at Springer publications Politico and Business Insider wrote to CEO Mathias Dopfner to protest the award.

Thiel, after all, was hardly seen by many as a friend of journalists. He secretly bankrolled a libel suit by Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media that drove the publication out of business. He recently backed an A.I. startup that evaluates what it sees as bias in news organizations and individual journalists.

Dopfner was unmoved. While his own journalists may have been troubled by the selection, he had no trouble finding someone willing to laud Thiel: CBS News President Bari Weiss.

In her introduction of Thiel, Weiss said, “I have the pleasure to introduce a man whose life and whose character embodies what I think of as the quintessential American spirit: heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent.”

Weiss acknowledged — OK, soft-pedaled — Thiel’s hostility toward the press:

There is a difference in our attitude, at least sometimes, toward the press and the vital role it plays in maintaining a liberal democracy. I view it as essential. It is my life’s work. I see it as an instrument of liberty and as an engine of progress that deserves to be invested in and perfected. But to the extent Peter and I disagree on this, I am going to consider it a victory for my side of the argument that he is here tonight receiving an award from an institution that has become synonymous with freedom of the press.”

Weiss chose to soft-pedal more than Thiel’s view of the press. Anna Wiener reported in the New Yorker in October 2021:

In 2009, he wrote an essay for Cato Unbound, an online libertarian journal published by the Cato Institute, in which he stated that he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible,” and that “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries” and the extension of voting rights to women had “rendered the notion of a ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Similarly, In an interview published in Tech Policy Press, Gil Duran, author of “The Nerd Reich — Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” said of Thiel, “In 2010, he gave a speech to a group of libertarians that was probably smaller than this room where he said that government is fundamentally evil and that technology was an incredible alternative to politics.”

Weiss has long used the rhetoric of free speech and the press. Her friends, it seems, are more prepared to tell you how they really feel.

Status: Döpfner and Bari’s Toast to Thiel

Status: Axel’s Thiel Tempest