Bild was founded by
Axel Springer (1912–1985) in 1952. It mostly consisted of pictures (hence the name
Bild,
German for picture).
Bild soon became the best-selling tabloid, by a wide margin, not only in Germany, but in all of Europe, though essentially to German readers. Through most of its history,
Bild was based in Hamburg. The paper moved its headquarters to Berlin in March 2008, stating that it was an essential base of operations for a national newspaper. It is printed nationwide with 32 localized editions. Special editions are printed in some favoured German holiday destinations abroad such as Spain, Italy, Turkey and Greece.
Bild sold more than five million copies every day in the 1980s. In 1993 the paper had a circulation of slightly more than four million copies, making it the most read newspaper in the country. In the period of 1995–96 its circulation was 4,300,000 copies. In 2001
Bild was the most read newspaper in
Europe, and also in Germany, with a circulation of 4,396,000 copies. Although it is still Germany's biggest paper, the circulation of
Bild, along with many other papers, has been on the decline in recent years. By the end of 2005, the figure dropped to 3.8 million copies. Its daily circulation in 2010 was 3,548,000, making the paper the fifth in the list of the world's biggest selling newspapers.
Bild is published in
tabloid format. In 2018 on average 2.2 million copies of the paper were printed across Germany and 416,567 readers took advantage of the paid digital offer Bild plus. In terms of subscribers, it is the largest in Europe and the fifth largest worldwide. In 2019 Bild started a weekly politic newspaper, named
Bild Politik, which ceased publications after a few months. In 2024 it formalized an alliance with pro-
Likud Israeli newspaper
Israel Hayom.
Editorial leanings . Previous front pages are affixed to the wall behind them. From the outset, the editorial drift was conservative and nationalist. In 1977 investigative journalist
Günter Wallraff worked for four months as an editor for the
Bild tabloid in
Hanover, Despite its general support for Germany's conservative parties and especially former chancellor
Helmut Kohl, its rhetoric, still populist in tone, is less fierce than it was thirty years ago. In 2004
Bild was publicly reprimanded twelve times by the (German Press Council).
International relations • During the
COVID-19 pandemic,
Bild editor Julian Reichelt accused Chinese leader
Xi Jinping of surveillance and other human rights crimes in an editorial titled "What China owes us" on 20 April 2020. After the Chinese embassy to Germany said that the
Bild editorial reproached "nationalism, prejudice, and hostility against China", Reichelt responded "You [Xi], your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it." • During the
2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,
Paul Ronzheimer, the deputy editor-in-chief and correspondent of
Bild, tweeted that
Ilham Aliyev, the
President of Azerbaijan, agreed to be interviewed by the newspaper, and that he suddenly changed his mind, specifying that the Azerbaijani side itself offered to conduct an interview with Aliyev. Then, aide to the Azerbaijani President,
Hikmet Hajiyev, responded with a tweet, calling his statement unprofessional and stating that Aliyev preferred to give interviews to professionals rather than the
yellow press. • Since 2021,
Bild has been increasingly supportive of Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and his
Likud party.''
It was one of the Western media channels that Netanyahu used in 2024 to leak alleged documents about his negotiations with Hamas that later turned out to be a disinformation campaign. Fteiha denied the accusations and accused Bild
of repeated breaches of journalistic ethics. The claims made in the Bild
report were debunked by the Israeli fact-checking organization FakeReporter and the French newspaper Libération''. ==Motto==