Media Chastened in Israel Broadcast Strike

When it was his turn to comment during a panel discussion last weekend on Israel’s image in the media, an editor from state radio remarked with somewhat wounded good humor: “Radio and television in Israel have no significance. We are six weeks on strike and nobody cares.”

On Wednesday, the strike by Israel Broadcasting Authority journalists ended its seventh week amid signs that an arbitration agreement may put them back on the air by this weekend.

Even if it does, however, it seems clear that the strike will have a lasting impact on a society that has traditionally been more addicted to broadcast news than perhaps any other in the industrialized world.

As the radio editor’s comments suggest, it is a severely chastened group of journalists who will go back to their microphones and news desks. They are so humiliated by the public’s startling indifference to the strike that some here fear they will be less effective in their role--unusual for state-funded broadcasters--as the loyal opposition to the government.

Programming changes are considered likely on state radio and television to reduce the percentage of broadcast time devoted to news, or at least to revise the way that news is presented.

And there may be a subtle shift in the whole relationship between the society and the broadcast media because of a new understanding of how the airwaves feed stress. The addiction of the average Israeli to hourly radio newscasts and the main, prime-time television news program is frequently cited as evidence of the high level of tension in the society. But the strike seems to have demonstrated that it is at least equally true that listening to all that news increases stress.

“Ignorance really is bliss,” said Sam, a hairdresser and admitted television junkie who requested that his surname not be used. He said he had enjoyed the strike because “it’s a relief not to have to see the faces of the politicians every night.”

According to a poll earlier this month for the Hebrew-language Yedioth Ahronot newspaper, 65% of Israelis agree with Sam, responding either that they had not been affected by the television strike or that their lives were easier for it. More than half said the same things about the Voice of Israel state radio.

The results are extraordinary for a country with a nominal government monopoly on the domestic airwaves. The state controls the main television channel and the Voice of Israel through the Israel Broadcasting Authority, whose directors are political appointees selected in direct proportion to the votes garnered by the major parties in the ruling coalition.

What triggered the strike by about 800 broadcast journalists was the government’s insistence that they accept the same percentage wage increase as other government employees rather than the larger raise necessary to keep them on a salary par with their colleagues in the print media. The highest paid television personalities here earn the equivalent of only about $1,300 a month.

The only domestic competition for state television is an educational station and one, still experimental, commercial channel that has been broadcasting for a few hours a day since last summer.

Depending on where they live, Israeli viewers also may be able to tune in on broadcasts from neighboring Arab countries. Jerusalemites, for example, receive Jordan television, which broadcasts in Arabic, English and French. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s Middle East television, transmitting in English from Southern Lebanon, can be seen with a special antenna as far south as Tel Aviv.

Israeli Army radio has proved a popular substitute for the Voice of Israel during the strike. Another, private Israeli station, the tiny Voice of Peace broadcasting from a boat offshore, is audible near the Mediterranean coast. And a number of Arabic and English-language stations, such as Jordan Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp., can be received on normal, medium-wave sets here.

Those alternatives are one reason Israelis have not panicked during the seven-week strike. About two-thirds of respondents to one poll said they are watching television despite the stoppage. Of those, nearly 25% say they tune in to one of the estimated 2,000 illegal cable systems now said to be operating in the country. About one-third watch Jordanian or Middle East television.

There also has been an explosion in sales and rentals of videos. With one of every 12 residents possessing a video recorder, Israel is said to have the highest per-capita ownership of VCRs in the world.

And the newspapers continue publishing.

Still, the strike has clearly altered the way Israelis learn about the world around them, and the fact that so few seem upset about it has triggered a national debate among politicians and the media.

Israel Broadcasting Authority journalists were totally taken aback by the public reaction, commented Lily Galili, who reports on the media for the influential Haaretz daily. “They were sure neither the politicians nor the public would be able to stand it without them,” she said in an interview. They felt that “if they took the drug away, all the addicts would rebel.”

Noting that many people, including even Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, are saying that they can live without the electronic media, Israel Radio’s managing news editor, Shalom Kital, said: “I think this is a very dangerous notion. . . . The public looks at us not in the right way, but as a service you can do without. Maybe the country can do without the Knesset (parliament), too.”

“Latent in this is a great danger to the public in a free country,” agreed Gabriel Strassman, a columnist for the Hebrew-language Maariv newspaper. “The public not only has the right to know what is happening--it has the obligation to know,” he wrote in a recent column. “If it forgoes the right, as well as the obligation, the time has come for some urgent repair work.”

However, according to Strassman, the problem is not so much the public. Rather, he said, public apathy is “a sign that something is very, very wrong with the media.”

“Our TV is just plain boring,” said Galili. “People don’t like TV because it’s not good enough.”

The critics are particularly harsh about broadcast news.

“There is hardly a TV news broadcast, whether at 9 p.m. or at midnight, which does not include a ‘confrontation’ or a panel discussion among party figures, Knesset members, ministers, politicians; verbiage aplenty which does not add or uplift, and has no meaning,” wrote Strassman. “Anyone who can emit a noise is invited to emit it, whether or not his opinions have news value. The ‘reactions’ become more important than the issues to which speakers are invited to react.”

Political scientist Allan E. Shapiro, writing in the English-language Jerusalem Post, also blasted the “format of confrontation” in the electronic media. “Heat, rather than light, is the major outcome,” he observed.

Dina Goren, adjutant professor of communications at Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan Universities here, said saturation coverage provided by the broadcast media contributes to “the trivialization and banalization of reality, which impede our ability to take an overall view of things as they develop.”

Goren added that the format of hourly or even half-hourly news broadcasts helps foster “a false perception according to whatever happened a moment ago is weightier and more consequential than something which occurred some time ago.”

During the last seven weeks, Israelis have found that they rather like it when they’re not bombarded constantly with the latest, often artificially inflated, news.

“I think it’s good for the people,” said Dvora Carmil, a sociologist at Haifa University’s R. D. Wolfe Center for Studies of Psychological Pressure. “I think they got used to it.” While she said the center has no studies to prove it, “it’s my personal belief” that the level of tension in the society is lower as a result of the strike.

To analysts like Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus, public reaction to the strike is indicative of a broader, dangerous apathy not just toward the media but toward crucial world and national events. “Our nerves have never been so calm; we’ve never been so apathetic as now,” he said. “We’re dying of boredom!”

By American or West European standards, the current apathy is clearly relative. Israel remains among the most highly politicized societies in the world--with or without radio and television.

Still, conceded Israel Radio’s Kital, “maybe the dose of news is too heavy for the Israeli public.”

Before it went off the air, Israel Radio broadcast hourly news bulletins on all four of its Hebrew frequencies. In addition there were numerous current affairs programs--six so-called news-magazine programs daily on the main frequency alone. News and current affairs constituted an estimated 25% of all Israeli Television programming.

Kital predicted that news coverage will be scaled back once transmissions are resumed.