Communications Minister Karhi Pushes Privatizing Israel’s Public Broadcaster

Photo Credit: טבעת-זרם / Wikipedia

Live show on Kol Israel.

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Economic Affairs Committee, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi (Likud) suggested that those who oppose the changes he is proposing for regulation of the communications market are essentially interested parties who don’t want anyone to “move their cheese.”

“Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life,” is a 1998 motivational business fable by Spencer Johnson that explores four different responses to change. The story follows two mice and two “Littlepeople” on their quest for cheese, symbolizing goals or desires in life. The book has sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide, been translated into 37 languages, and remains one of the best-selling business books.

Minister Karhi said, “The private market is suffocating from excess regulation, and the public broadcasting is not public, and it’s sometimes harmful. It’s time for a substantive, sincere, and responsible debate, which is the basis for democratic choice. Public broadcasting was needed in the previous century, but today there is no justification for financing such a product at the public’s expense, certainly not in news and current affairs.”

MK Shlomo Karhi with a friend. / MK Shlomo Karhi’s Facebook page

Kol Israel (lit. the voice of Israel) was the country’s public radio service since 1948. It began as the radio outlet of the Hagana underground and became the national radio station when it broadcast Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. It operated as a division of the Israel Broadcasting Service from 1951 to 1965, and later the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) from 1965 to 2017. Following the IBA’s closure, the Kol Israel radio stations and the Kan11 television channels are currently operated by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation.

Until the 1990s, as long as the public channels were facing limited competition, their ratings were enormous, very much like the BBC in the UK before it started to race against commercial competitors. Nowadays, despite a budget of close to one billion shekels ($280 million), a distinguished news corporation, and numerous prestigious dramatic and other local productions, the IPBC is lagging far behind the other mainstream channels, including the newcomers Channel 14 and i24News.

Meanwhile, because the majority of its on-air staff are part of the left, and propagate anti-government messages quite shamelessly, many on the right in Israel have been wondering for years why their taxes should support programming that is hostile to them, their political beliefs, and their way of life.

Minister Karhi appears to be the first politician to take on the IPBC, after more than 30 years during which the majority of Israeli voters have been demanding its closure.

These are Karhi’s outline items:

• Closing the news and current affairs section of the IPBC
• Channel 11 will be dedicated to original Israeli productions, or a fund would be established to invest in original productions
• Channel Makan 33, which broadcasts in Arabic, will be shut down
• Five out of the seven radio stations belonging to IPBC will remain
• The cleared radio frequencies will be offered in a tender to national commercial radio stations
• The broadcasting corporation’s archive will be available in exchange for operating fees only
• A ban on advertisements and sponsorships in IPBC
• The new corporation’s budget will be NIS 500 million ($139 million) – instead of NIS 800 million ($222 million) today
• The government will preserve the rights of employees, who would receive retirement offers and priority in civil service tenders

President of the Israel Press Council Supreme Court Justice (ret.) Hanan Melcer told the Knesset committee that one of the things that people want to remove from the media is the outcry of the hostages’ families and references to the fiasco that led to this situation.

The honorable former justice clearly ignored the fact that practically every on-air, as well as a myriad broadcasts in Israel either open or close with a word about the hostages, and/or are drenched with the topic of hostages in between.

Melcer said that there was a strategy of MKs’ private bills, asserting that “There is a forest of all kinds of bills, sometimes contradicting each other; sometimes the sponsors don’t come to explain their bills, and the Minister of Communications, who is the representative of the Government, comes and explains their bills instead. If you look at the overall picture, the idea is to revoke the democratic nature of the state, because its democratic nature depends on the free media, and that’s how it is in all democratic states.”

He added: “The transition from an objective body to a body under government auspices is known, but not from democratic states. That exists in Hungary, China, it existed in the Soviet Union; I hope we don’t want to be similar to those countries,” he said.”

The only problem with Melcer’s analysis is its complete detachment from the reality of commercial broadcasting in Israel, where the two major channels, 12 and 13, are vehemently opposed to the Netanyahu government, and feature panelists who every hour deliver biased speeches that are part of an ongoing effort to topple the PM they cannot defeat at the ballot box. Also, the vast majority of newspapers and online news outlets share the same strategy.

In that context, Mercer’s outcry is truly about his cheese that would be removed.

Committee Chair MK David Bitan (Likud) said, “Channels 12 and 13 are private, and they’re not in favor of us at all. So, if we sell Channel 11 to a private entity, this won’t change anything for the political right…”