USA · Bias: Center
Axel Springer (Germany)
Politico launched in 2007 with a simple bet: cover Washington the way ESPN covers sports — obsessively, for insiders, at newsletter speed. It won the bet. Its Playbook morning email became the Beltway's shared bloodstream, and 'Politico-style' is now shorthand for politics covered as a game of who's up and who's down. In 2021, German publishing giant Axel Springer bought it for about $1 billion — the biggest US digital-media deal of its era — making DC's hometown gossip sheet foreign-owned, which Washington found funnier than Berlin did.
On May 2, 2022, Politico published the leaked draft of the Supreme Court's Dobbs opinion, revealing weeks in advance that Roe v. Wade would fall. Nothing like it had happened in the Court's modern history — draft opinions simply do not leak. The scoop triggered a marshal's investigation that never publicly identified the leaker, moved abortion to the center of the midterms months early, and permanently punctured the Court's aura of monastic secrecy. One newsletter shop, one PDF, one constitutional earthquake.
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