Executive Mathias Döpfner said that Politico staff would need to adhere to Axel Springer's principles, including support for a united Europe, "reconciliation between Germans and Jews," Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, and that staff who disagree with the principles "should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly". In October 2021, an article in The New York Times reported accusations of sexual misconduct, sexual discrimination and questionable business practices at Axel Springer SE. A day later, the publisher fired the editor-in-chief of Bild. Criticism Pro-American editorial bias and alleged ties to US intelligence agencies According to German scholar Gudrun Kruip of the Stiftung Bundespräsident-Theodor-Heuss-Haus, Axel Springer SE and its subsidiaries spread a strongly pro-American view in which criticism of US foreign policy is largely absent. In an interview with The Nation, two former CIA officers alleged that Axel Springer received $7 million from the CIA to support American geopolitical interests with his publishing house. Springer reportedly agreed and began guiding the editorial bias towards supporting US foreign policy. Although no conclusive evidence has come to light, Kruip considers the CIA officers' allegations credible since Springer, according to his own autobiography, had no money to actually fund the publishing house when it was founded, and it was thus unlikely that he could finance its rapid ascent without "money from the outside". As of 2021, the Axel Springer SE names "solidarity with the libertarian values of the United States of America" as one of its core principles on its own website. Many scholars and independent observers allege a "subservience to American geopolitical interests" of the publishing house and its subsidiaries to this day. According to Foreign Policy, Axel Springer SE "has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes." Accusations of editorial interference in Poland In 2017, Ringer Axel Springer Polska was accused of editorial interference, when the head of the joint venture Mark Dekan wrote a letter to the company's Polish employees in which he disparaged the head of the conservative Law and Justice political party, calling the Polish politician Jaroslaw Kaczynski a "loser" for opposing the candidacy of Donald Tusk as President of the European Council, stating that "...we should never forget about the basic values that we represent... Here is the moment where free media, such as ours must be active. We speak for the ideas of... a United Europe." In the letter, Dekan also