MIDEAST : Anger at Media Rises With Israeli Right

After more than two decades delivering the nightly news on Channel 1, anchor Haim Yavin is Israel’s Mr. Television. And in a country where even Cabinet ministers show up for work in their shirt sleeves, his dark suits and horn-rimmed glasses are the picture of conservatism.

Yet to the right-wing supporters of Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Television is a symbol of leftist elitism.

Yavin is the face of an institution they perceive as hostile to Netanyahu’s Likud Party, one that inaccurately predicted his defeat to incumbent Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the early hours of election night.

“I could tell by the smile on Haim Yavin’s face that Peres was leading in the exit polls,” said Yehuda Amir, a “Likudnik” who added with satisfaction that the final results wiped the smile off Yavin’s face.

Anger at the Israeli media spilled onto the world stage during Netanyahu’s victory rally Sunday, when the prime minister-elect interrupted his speech to reprimand the crowd for booing journalists and jostling them with signs such as one that read, “Go Home, Haim Yavin.”

In the wake of Netanyahu’s victory, several Likud members threatened to settle accounts with the media--and particularly with the publicly owned Channel 1, one of only two Israeli television channels.

The most controversial statement came from Likud campaign manager Limor Livnat, who is seeking appointment as communications minister in the new Cabinet.

Calling for a punitive privatization of Channel 1, she said: “There is no need of a state broadcast authority, especially after it becomes one-sided and unstately.”

Her comments prompted such an outcry from the Israeli media that Netanyahu was forced to issue a statement reaffirming his belief that the media play an important role in the democratic life of Israel.

His spokesman, Shai Bazak, said that Netanyahu’s intention to privatize the government-controlled Israel Broadcasting Authority, which oversees Channel 1 and Israel Radio, is part of a general policy favoring privatization and has nothing to do with revenge.

The Journalists’ Assn. adamantly defended the television and print coverage of the campaign.

So did Zvi Lidar, spokesman for the Israel Broadcasting Authority, saying: “We do not feel that any public body or political factor was discriminated against or underrepresented in this past election campaign.”

But conservative media watchdogs argued that Netanyahu received less air time and more critical treatment than Peres.

When Channel 1’s election coverage began, said Aaron Lerner, who publishes the Independent Media Review and Analysis newsletter, it ran a short color story on the opening of the Likud campaign “and then gave a Labor member of Knesset [the Parliament] an open microphone to attack Likud.”

“The Likud always thinks the media is against it,” political columnist Zeev Chafetz said. “And the reason is, primarily, that it’s true. In Israel, like in most countries, the media tends to be liberal.”

Columnist Hemi Shalev of the independent Maariv newspaper concurred, but added: “However, here, as in the rest of the democratic world, their loyalties are to the facts and reality and not to preaching or lecturing on behalf of any side. There is no journalist in the world who would give up a scoop because it doesn’t suit his political agenda.”

Given the election results, he said, “it is clear that if there was some kind of leaning or bias in the media, it didn’t affect the voters.”

Some journalists argued that the reverse was true.

Likud, they said, used media-bashing as a campaign tactic to reinforce its image as an underdog, unable to get a fair shake, and to play off the anti-establishment feelings of many of its supporters.

Israel’s media began, before the state was created in 1948, as party newspapers. In the 1950s, the media saw themselves as “mobilized to the national cause,” according to Yoram Peri, a professor of communications at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Gradually the media became a more critical voice of government policies, to the point that in the mid-1970s then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin accused it of being a “leftist mafia.”

In 1995, Rabin, prime minister once again, accused the media of going to the other extreme, giving too much air time to right-wing Jewish settlers opposed to his policies. Rabin was later assassinated by a right-wing Jewish law student.

Like many journalists, Peri predicts that the current clash between the media and Likud will subside.

“The media needs the government as its main source of information,” he said. “And Netanyahu is Westernized and understands the importance of the media. He loves it.”