The newspaper was one of the first licenced by the US military administration in 1945 and had a traditional social democratic, antifascist and trade union stand.

Starting with the decline of printed daily newspapers in the 2000s, the FR changed ownership several times, reduced its editorial team dramatically and today has little national significance.

But all commercial activity of the paper, printing, selling advertisement and distribution was put in the hands of the Frankfurter Societät.

On 1 April 2018, the Frankfurter Societät's ninety per-cent share was sold to Zeitungsholding Hessen, an investment vehicle of the publisher Dirk Ippen.

In October 2021, Ippen blocked the publication by the Franfurter Rundschau of an investigative report on accusations of abuse of power made against former Bild editor, Julian Reichelt.

The licence was handed over to the first team of editors consisting of Emil Carlebach, Hans Etzkorn, Wilhelm Karl Gerst, Otto Grossmann, Wilhelm Knothe, Paul Rodemann and Arno Rudert, a progressive think-tank of social democrats, political Catholics and communists, who had spent years in the resistance and Nazi concentration camps or in exile.

With the coming of the Cold War, the American occupation authority forced all communist members of the editorial team to leave the paper two years later.

The German government only procured the HS-30 armored personnel carrier for the Bundeswehr because bribes had been paid to several responsible persons and illegal payments had been made to the CDU.

The social democrats emphasized that they wanted to assure the future of one of the few left-liberal daily newspapers in Germany and asserted they would not exert influence on the articles.

Only a few days later, on 18 July 2007, the DDVG announced that it would sell 50 percent plus one share to the independent publishing company M. DuMont Schauberg based in Cologne, Germany.

Shortly afterwards, the managing director Max Rempel[13] fired three employeed editors and officially justified this by discontinuing the newspaper's unprofitable additional products.