Binyamin Netanyahu’s obsession with the press
IN OCTOBER 2015 a journalist called Amir Tibon was asked by his editors at Walla!, a popular Israeli news website, to analyse Binyamin Netanyahu’s handling of a wave of shooting and stabbing attacks by Palestinians. The resulting piece was balanced, but included some mild criticism of the prime minister. According to Mr Tibon, the next morning he received a phone call from his editor-in-chief, who said, “We can’t publish this. You know what the circumstances are right now.”
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Other reporters at Walla! now tell similar stories of being censored when their reports were critical of Mr Netanyahu. The police have offered a possible explanation. In December they recommended that Mr Netanyahu and seven other suspects, including the former chairman of Bezeq, a telecommunications company, be indicted for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. In return for positive coverage on Walla!, Mr Netanyahu is alleged to have intervened in regulatory matters to benefit Bezeq, which owns the website.
Reporters in Israel tend to be secular liberals, but their exposés have brought down politicians of all stripes. Mr Netanyahu, who leads a coalition of nationalist and religious parties, has long believed the press is bent on tarnishing his image, thwarting his plans and removing him from power. He thus set about trying to change the media landscape. He has pushed for laws and rules that would undercut his critics and boost his allies; encouraged his supporters to buy media outlets; and bullied reporters. He may also have broken the law.
Media magnet
The investigation into Mr Netanyahu’s dealings with Bezeq, known as Case 4000, is one of three that threaten to bring him down. The police have also recommended indicting Mr Netanyahu in Case 2000, in which he is accused of negotiating illicit deals with a newspaper publisher for more favourable coverage. The third, Case 1000, involves Mr Netanyahu’s acceptance of gifts, allegedly worth over $200,000, from Israeli tycoons (indictments were also recommended). Mr Netanyahu denies wrongdoing in all three. The attorney-general will decide soon whether to proceed with them.
Early in his career, when he was Israel’s dashing young ambassador to the United Nations, Mr Netanyahu benefited from glowing media coverage. Gushing profiles described how the eloquent diplomat was making Israel’s case on the global stage. Reporters, presciently, cast him as a future prime minister. The exposure helped him gain the top spot on the Likud party’s list of candidates when he first ran for the Knesset in 1988.
But his relations with the press deteriorated. When the Labour government under Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo accords with the Palestinians in 1993, most journalists supported it. Mr Netanyahu, who had become leader of Likud, was the treaty’s chief critic. When, two years later, a Jewish zealot murdered Mr Rabin, much of the press accused Mr Netanyahu of whipping up his supporters against the prime minister.
By the time Likud won at the polls in 1996, Mr Netanyahu’s supporters had begun referring to the “hostile press”. When he lost power in 1999, he blamed reporters for downplaying his accomplishments. Years later, while still in the political wilderness, he told his wealthy patrons, “I need my own media,” and urged them to buy shares in news organisations. Sheldon Adelson, an American casino mogul, went a step further, founding his own freesheet, called Yisrael Hayom, which quickly became Israel’s most widely read newspaper. It is so pro-Netanyahu that it is often called “Bibiton”—a portmanteau of Mr Netanyahu’s nickname, “Bibi”, and the Hebrew word for newspaper, iton. Avigdor Lieberman, an ultranationalist former defence minister, compared it to Pravda.
The popularity of Yisrael Hayom, which operates at a hefty loss, came at the expense of Israel’s older newspapers, many of which saw their revenues from sales and advertising drop. This, according to the police, led to negotiations between Mr Netanyahu and Arnon Mozes, the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth, a large newspaper that was critical of the prime minister. The two men were recorded discussing a deal that would have the paper ease up on Mr Netanyahu. “Take down the hostility towards me from 9.5 to 7.5,” he told Mr Mozes. In return, Mr Netanyahu would allow legislation that limited the circulation of popular freesheets, such as Yisrael Hayom. Those discussions form the basis of Case 2000.
When the deal fell through, Mr Netanyahu reverted to opposing the Yisrael Hayom bill, going so far as to dissolve his government in order to block it.
Following his fourth election victory in 2015, Mr Netanyahu appointed himself communications minister and allegedly intervened on Bezeq’s behalf. He also changed the regulations on private television broadcasters in ways that drove Channel 10, which was critical of the prime minister, to the brink of bankruptcy. On January 14th the channel merged with Reshet, another private channel. Its main shareholder is now Len Blavatnik, a Soviet-born British-American businessman who has been questioned by the police over his ties to Mr Netanyahu.
In early 2017, under pressure from the opposition and Israel’s high court, Mr Netanyahu stepped down as communications minister. But he continued to influence the media. Later in the year he sought pre-emptively to muzzle a new public broadcaster by denying it permission to create a news department. Again he threatened to dissolve the government if he did not get his way (he later backed down). Meanwhile, a private station called Channel 20, originally licensed to broadcast religious content, received the government’s blessing to run news programmes. These often cast the prime minister in a positive light. Mr Netanyahu favours it for interviews.
With Yisrael Hayom and Channel 20, Mr Netanyahu has a growing echo-chamber. But claims that Israel is going the way of Hungary, where Viktor Orban, the prime minister, has throttled the press, are overstated. Channel 20, with dismal ratings, is not nearly as influential as Fox News is in America. Most Israeli journalists remain critical of Mr Netanyahu—and have the backing of their editors and publishers.
For Mr Netanyahu, that might not be a bad thing. He seems to enjoy playing the victim and has become an astute user of social media. As Israel gears up for an election on April 9th, billboards recently appeared featuring the pictures of four journalists who have published damaging revelations about the prime minister. A slogan on top reads, “They won’t decide” (a Facebook page with the same name was opened). After some confusion over who put them up, Likud took responsibility, adding a note to some of the billboards: “Despite them, Netanyahu!”