From Leona Lewis’s Spirit to Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Ice Road Truckers on Five, Bertelsmann is the German media company to entertain you. It might be worth £10 billion, something you could confirm if you could find its listing on the stock market – but you can’t, because it is private, remote-controlled in one way or another by the Mohn family, whose aged patriarch Reinhard still sits on the supervisory board – although it is his wife Liz, a former secretary, who is the biggest influence today.

Not having a share price to defend is one of life’s luxuries, and not going public is a subject over which the Mohns obsess, having spent £3.1 billion to buy out a minority shareholder two years ago to prevent a float. In a week when Bear Stearns turned out to be worth $2 a share and when even Johnston Press’s Blackpool Gazette gets up in the storm, that probably feels like a good place to be. At least it is until you look at Bertelsmann’s results, released this week.

Of its six divisions, four failed to register growth last year, so the overall improvement was a lousy 0.4 per cent. Random House, the normally reliable book publisher, managed to make Pearson’s Penguin look good, as it blamed a downturn in the American economy for restrained book-buying, but Gruner + Jahr cannot make headway in magazines, even though it is trying to expand globally.

Everybody knows that music is a terrible business, so Sony BMG can be forgiven – and it will come as no surprise – that falling CD sales have hurt the mail-order business in the United States. Except that it did seem to come as a surprise to Bertelsmann, whose board members all voted to pay $400 million (£200 million) to buy an American mail-order CD club as recently as 2005. Only RTL, the broadcaster behind Five, and Arvato, a complex services business, whose idea of media is providing council services to the citizens of East Riding, Yorkshire, are growing.

British journalists like to think that Bertelsmann/RTL is a powerful force that will buy ITV one day. Listen to the annual results, though, and the parent company has €7.7 billion (£6 billion) of debt. It hopes to spend €5 billion on acquisitions in five years, not a lot by global standards, but not much of that will be available this year because of the debt. No wonder senior executives say that ITV is too expensive – they have to talk down the price even from its present bombed-out levels before they can afford it.

All this is a far cry from the swashbuckling days of Thomas Middelhoff, the Anglophile chief executive who was booted out after thinking that he might persuade the Mohns to float. Mr Middelhoff bought Random House, did the deals that made RTL, now the best business, and made a ridiculous sum, $7 billion, on a half-share of AOL Europe.

Now, there is a cosier approach, where keeping the family happy matters too much. Remarkably, there is almost no Asian business and not much internet to talk about, although Hartmut Ostrowski, the new chief executive, talks about changing that. Yet a limited appetite for risk is already being seen in limited rewards, with profits up by only 3.4 per cent last year.

In one sense, this – gloriously – does not matter, because Bertelsmann is not a public company. Those who quiz the chief executive on the anaemic performance find a man willing to shrug his shoulders and admit that results have not been good enough. This kind of lackadaisical attitude is what can happen when you do not have anybody else, say the financial markets, breathing down your neck. In the end, independence counts for nothing if it merely yields piles of unbought books and CDs.

— Congratulations to the McCanns for winning an unprecedented double front-page apology from Richard Desmond’s dailies. Mr Desmond has made millions from the Daily Express and the Daily Star, partly by cutting back on editorial costs. Half a million pounds will do little to dent his wealth, but it does send a message that endlessly putting the same three or four stories on the front page is not credible journalism. Unfortunately, not every victim of sloppy crime reporting, where rumours are dressed up as news, is able to take on newspapers to get redress. It is also unfortunate that Diana, Princess of Wales, cannot take similar action to stop stories about her appearing with nauseating frequency.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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