The urgent business of the next government by Caroline Glick

...The last government collapsed due to the weakness of Israel’s democratic institutions. The most acute expressions of that weakness are the closed electronic media market and the tyranny of our unelected legal fraternity. Most recently, the deficiencies of our election finance laws was also exposed as a threat to our system, easily exploited by foreign influence peddlers. From the moment it takes office, the next government is going to be faced with massive challenges on every front. To surmount them, and so ensure it can fulfill the mandate it received from the public, our elected leaders must take immediate steps to strengthen our democracy.

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
20 March '15..

On Tuesday, the the people of Israel spoke. They gave a clear mandate to the nationalist camp, led by the Likud and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, to lead the country.

Now that the people have spoken, our leaders must consider the steps they must take, immediately upon entering office, that will enable them to advance their agenda and so meet the public’s expectations.

To understand why this is necessary, we need to recall why Netanyahu decided to dismantle his last coalition government and opt for an early election. What made Netanyahu decide that he would be better off going to an election and risk losing power rather than maintaining his existing government intact? There were two developments that caused Netanyahu to break up his coalition government by firing then-justice minister Tzipi Livni and then-finance minister Yair Lapid. First, they voted in favor of the so-called “Israel Hayom” bill, legislation that would have forced the closure of the mass circulation free daily “Israel Hayom.”

Second, they opposed draft legislation for a basic law that would give a new quasi-constitutional anchor to Israel’s Jewish identity – the so-called Nation-State bill.

The “Israel Hayom” bill was a raw act of aggression against Israel’s democratic system. The legislation was an attempt by the political Left, together with media moguls, to censor and silence the only mass circulation Hebrew daily with an editorial line significantly different from the rest of the mass media in the country.

Whether you love or hate the paper owned by Netanyahu’s supporter, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, if you care about Israel’s democratic system, the notion that lawmakers would act in collusion with media moguls – or even on the own – to pass a censorship law with the goal of forcing the closure of a newspaper should disturb you deeply.

Consequently, one of the most urgent orders of business on the next government’s agenda must be to contend with the forces in our society that support censorship of ideas and the ideological uniformity of our mass media.

The proper response to this attempt to silence different voices and prevent an open discourse in this country is not simply to tear up the draft legislation.

The proper response is to open up the media market to competition. To this end, the government must direct its attention to the one remaining media market that remains closed to competition: the electronic media.

The government should act as quickly as possible to open the television and radio waves to market forces. Everyone with the financial wherewithal should have the right to buy and operate a radio or television station. To achieve this, the government needs to take two steps.

First, it needs to end all restrictions on content in television and radio broadcasting aside from provisions barring the airing of pornography and other social ills. Second, it needs to make media licensing conditional on the licensee’s prior agreement to broadcast IDF messages during states of emergency. Under the new system, state owned media outlets, including Army Radio, will be privatized.

The second step the government must take to ensure free competition in the mass media is to sell operating licenses to operate television and radio stations. The licenses should be restricted only by the constraints of the electromagnetic spectrum. The right to decide if a media outlet succeeds or fails ought to belong to the public, not to a group of unelected “media professionals” sitting on a content committee.

The “Israel Hayom” draft law was a threat to Israeli democracy. And the threat would have been carried out if the election results had been different. To ensure that we don’t face a similar threat in the future, we need a media market full of different voices saying different things, competing for our attention. As long as Israel Hayom remains the only mass media organ with a unique voice, it will remain under threat from the forces that prefer unanimity to variety in our public discourse.

Although the next Knesset will have the votes to pass the Nation-State bill, there is no pressing need to do so, although it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the legislation did become law. The reason it doesn’t matter one way or another is because the legislation is redundant. Its central components, those that define Israel as the Jewish state, are already anchored in standing law, including basic laws with quasi-constitutional standing.

The Nation-State bill was controversial not because the Left supports changing the national anthem from “Hatikva” to the PLO’s anthem “Baladi, Baladi.” The Left opposed the legislation because its leaders feared the law would weaken the Supreme Court.

A smear of Israel that boggles the mind

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
01 May '13..

Freedom House released its annual report on press freedom throughout the world today at an event sponsored by the Newseum in Washington. But along with the usual and appropriate condemnations of dictatorships and totalitarian states, the group decided to slam the one democracy in the Middle East as well as one of the few states in the region where press freedom actually exists: Israel.

Karin Karleklar, the organization’s project direct for monitoring press freedom, told an audience at the Newseum streamed live over the Internet this morning that Israel’s status was being downgraded from “free” to “partly free.” This is astonishing by itself, but the bizarre nature of this judgment is only made clear when one hears the reasons. Two of the reasons stated by Karleklar—the indictment of a journalist for possessing stolen classified materials and the problems that one television station has had in getting its license renewed—are hardly violations of freedom but do speak to issues that could be misinterpreted as tyrannical if they were discussing a country where there wasn’t a vibrant free press. But the third is so absurd as to call into question not merely the judgment but the impartiality of the entire report.

The report claims that the appearance on the scene of Israel Hayom, a relatively new Israeli newspaper, is a threat to press freedom because it is a success that has hurt the business prospects of its competitors. No, you didn’t misread that sentence. Freedom House is taking the position that the fact that Israel Hayom has claimed an impressive share of the hyper-competitive newspaper market is undermining the freedom of the press. The justification for this ridiculous claim is that Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul and well-known contributor to Republican candidates, has “subsidized” the paper and that its editorial line favors Prime Minister Netanyahu. The paper, which is distributed free of charge, is now the most-read paper in Israel, a state of affairs which Freedom House not unreasonably connects to the demise of Maariv, a longtime mainstay of the Hebrew daily press. But the question readers of this report have to ask is what in the name of Joseph Pulitzer does the ability of Adelson’s paper to succeed where many other print papers are failing have to do with freedom of the press?

Competitors try to close down new Israeli Daily

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
23 December 09

Until recently, the Israeli Hebrew media was dominated by three daily newspapers. The most sophisticated daily, Haaretz, known for its far left post-Zionist agenda has a small circulation but is widely read by opinion makers.

But the market has until recently been dominated by two tabloids, Yediot Achronot and Maariv, both of which have a penchant for sensationalism.

Two years ago, a new newspaper appeared on the scene. Yisrael Hayom*. It recruited some of the best journalists, but many predicted that a paper circulated for free which based its income exclusively on advertising would not succeed. All the more so, in an environment when newspapers in Israel and throughout the rest of the world underwent difficulties as the Internet began intruding into their market and the global financial meltdown was making its impact.

But, contrary to expectations, Yisrael Hayom grew from strength to strength and has revolutionized the entire newspaper industry. Already today, it enjoys Israel’s second largest circulation and is likely to overtake the leader Yediot Achronot in the near future.

The paper was launched by US business tycoon Sheldon Adelson, one of the most generous Jewish philanthropists of our time who has distributed unprecedented amounts of money for various social causes in Israel as well as becoming the largest donor to Birthright.

The success of the newspaper is reflected in the fact that both Yediot Achronot and Maariv in desperation approached various parliamentarians beholden to them and attempted to block the newspaper by introducing legislation making it illegal for nonresidents to publish an Israeli daily newspaper.

(Read full article)
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