Manova News

Rubikon is owned and operated by Jens Wernicke's non-profit company called Initiative zur Demokratisierung der Meinungsbildung gemeinnützige GmbH (Initiative for the Democratization of Opinion Formation non-profit GmbH) and is based in Mainz. In 2017 Wernicke, Dr. Johannes Hofbauer (Wien) and Dirk Sadlowski founded and owned the company. The Manova.news-archive lists articles previously published in "Rubikon – The Magazine for the Critical Mass". According to Initiative for the Democratization of Opinion Formation non-profit GmbH, the website is entirely financed by donations. When all company shares were in the sole ownership of editor-in-chief Wernicke, who was also the sole managing director. == Content ==

Content on the website is written by various authors. In the early days of the blog, some authors supported Rubikon as an independend media outlet to amplify progressive discourse within German society. German publicist Wolf Wetzel, who wrote at Rubikon from its foundation until his departure in 2018, criticized this construction for having „eine [...] klare [...] Hierarchie“ ("a [...] clear [...] hierarchy"): In the first few years after its founding, Rubikon quickly developed into a medium in which crude political theses were disseminated with the impetus to represent suppressed opinions. == Reception ==

Scientific reception The Americanist Michael Butter includes Rubikon in the alternative media with outlets such as KenFM, Telepolis or NachDenkSeiten, which would all form a counter-public to the traditional quality media and public broadcasting. They used conspiracy theories like that of the "lying press" and sold them as serious news. Journalistic reception When the website was launched for three months in 2017, the journalist Christiane Enkeler told Deutschlandfunk that the magazine presented itself as „sehr heterogen“ ("very heterogeneous"). According to her, the critical analysis of leading media was successful. Overall, Rubikon would still be in development. Simon Hurtz referred to the website in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2020 as „Querfront-Magazin“. Roger Schawinski calls it an „Internetportal mit Verschwörungstheoretiker-Groove“ ("Internet portal with a conspiracy theorist groove"). According to Erik Peter from taz, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rubikon became a platform for the conspiracy scene in Berlin that negated the danger of the virus. Der Spiegel called Rubikon „eine Art Hausmedium der Protestler“ ("a kind of in-house media for protesters") around Anselm Lenz, in which „verschwörungsideologische Beiträge“ ("contributions to the ideology of conspiracies") were published again and again. == References ==