The Role of the Editor in Israels Media world / Ari Rath

By Ari Rath

Freedom of the Press and the Electronic Media is not an absolute, given concept. It has to be fought for every day. One has to adapt often to fast-changing circumstances, in order to safeguard the core of Press Freedom, which is and should be the litmus test of a truly free and democratic society.

In this ongoing struggle, the role of the Editor is pivotal. He or her have to exercise their authority on three fronts:
- Towards the owner and publisher
- Towards the editorial staff
- Towards the authorities and the powers that be

To quote the American President Harry Truman, who shaped the borders of post-war Europe and took the fatal decision to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The buck stops here.”

Responsible editors and journalists ought to ask themselves time and again which price are we allowed to pay for a so-called “good story.” The failure of the American and international media during the first phase of the Iraq War to insist on their principles and to accept a new term in the media world, which became known as “Embedded Journalism”, has become a symbol of what responsible editors and reporters should never agree to do.

The very concept of allowing a journalist to act like an enlisted soldier and to obey the orders of the company- or battalion-commander, runs counter to any tenet of true and independent journalism.

A case in point is the initial, restrained and timid U.S. media coverage of the dismal failure in the total lack of coordination and exchange of sources and information between the CIA and FBI. Such coordination and exchange of information might have helped to prevent the Al-Qaida pilot-suicide-terrorists from carrying out the unprecedented disaster of 9/11/2001 which destroyed the Twin-Towers Trade Center in New York and hit the Pentagon in Washington.

Another form of intrusion into the factual and honest reporting of security-linked events, are the recurrent attempts of so-called „word-laundering”, which substitute descriptions of seemingly grim events, such as excessive use of force or the killing of innocent by-standers, with rather meaningless and routine-sounding phrases. Thus, for instance, harsh actions by Israeli security forces, which capture terrorist suspects, often become the “apprehension of persons required for interrogation”.

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The development of the press and the electronic media in Israel, and in the pre-State years of the “Yishuv” – the Jewish community in Palestine under the British Mandate, whose history is often chronicled by its recurrent wars, seems an interesting and worthwhile case study, in order to measure the strength of its democratic society. In the earlier years of the State, as a carry-over from the “Yishuv” under the Mandate, almost every political party had its own newspaper. Whenever a split occurred in one of the parties, which was a frequent phenomenon in those days, the new separate faction would immediately begin to publish its own newspaper. It was, as if the adage applied “if you don’t have your own newspaper – you are not a party.”

Because of the vital importance of national events, already under the Mandate, the editors of the various Jewish newspapers formed a “Response Committee” that would deal primarily with the response and reactions by the press to excesses by the British Mandate authorities. There were a number of cases, when a Jewish newspaper was closed down for several days, or even longer, because it had written disparagingly about certain decisions or actions by the British Mandate authorities, like scathing criticism of the deportation of so-called “illegal” immigrants to Cyprus, or had defied military censorship orders.

Military censorship operated under special British emergency rules, whose origins can actually be found during the first years of World War Two. Not many people recall that during the years 1940-1942 Palestine was under the direct threat of Hitler’s Germany and of Italy under Mussolini. From the south, came the threat of Field-Marshall Rommel’s approaching Africa Corps from North Africa; in the summer of 1940 the Italian Air Force, that was still based on the island of Rhodes, bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv several times, causing scores of casualties; and in the spring of 1941, when the French Mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon were loyal to the pro-German French Vichy-Government, a squadron of the Damascus-based German Luftwaffe bombed the port of Haifa and the near-by oil refineries night after night.

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The British authorities extended the World War Two emergency rules until the end of their own rule in Palestine in May 1948. However, after the victory of the Allies in May 1945, these rules were no longer applied against the German enemy, but in most cases against the Jews in Palestine, who now fought Britain for the right of Jewish Holocaust survivors to enter Palestine. In a strange twist, the Israel Government used these former British emergency rules for many years as the legal basis of Israel’s military censorship, because of its reluctance to promulgate its own censorship legislation

After the State of Israel was founded in May 1948, this “Response Committee” became the “Committee of Editors of Daily Newspapers”. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, took pride in the fact that he could entrust the Editors’ Committee with highly confidential and security-sensitive issues, without having to fear any leak to the public, something he could often not expect from his own Cabinet members. Although the newspaper editors seemed satisfied to be able to learn about a number of important state secrets and future political moves, this sharing of confidential knowledge with the Government also carried a certain price. It committed the editors to keep the secret and not to publish what they had learned, but it provided them nevertheless with important background information that could be used in their editorials and commentaries.

An interesting example was, when the editors were told of the secret agreement with the Shah of Iran to transport Persian oil through a new land-pipeline from the Red Sea port of Eilat to Ashkelon at the Mediterranean shore and from there by oil tankers to Europe. This became an important alternative oil supply route to Europe, when the Suez Canal was blocked after the 1967 War.

Another important sharing of state secrets with the press and the media was during the first week of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. At a dramatic meeting with the editors on October 11, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan could announce with satisfaction that the Syrians had at last been stopped on the Golan Heights and that Israeli troops were advancing towards Damascus. Similarly, Israel was already preparing the counter-crossing of the Suez Canal to its Egyptian Western shore. At the same time, Dayan could also announce at that meeting that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had finally agreed to launch massive re-armament supplies by air, to replenish Israel’s heavy losses during the first days of the war. This was a major change from Dayan’s meeting with the editors two days earlier, on October 9, when he spoke in a gloomy mood of the danger that the “Third Temple” of the Jewish people might face destruction.

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But the real surprise of that editors meeting was yet to come, when the then Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Nathan Peled, announced that the Kremlin had agreed to allow some 50,000 Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union to come to Israel, on condition that this dramatic decision by Moscow would not be published. This surprise move by the Soviet Union seems to have been meant as punishment of Egypt and Syria, because they launched the October 1973 War without the approval and even against the advice of the Kremlin.

Nevertheless, not all the editors agreed always to this arrangement between the press and the Government. Foremost in his reservation and opposition to this confidence-sharing agreement was the long-time Publisher and Editor of the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, Gershom Schocken. At one point, Ha’aretz even left the Newspaper Editors Committee for a longer period, in order to maintain its absolute editorial integrity. Hence, Ha’aretz could only be restrained by the rules of the Israeli Military Censor.

The big break between Israel’s press and media and the Defence establishment came in the wake of the trauma of the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in October 1973. Military and security issues were no longer considered to be a “sacred cow” and from now on Israel’s Government and its military and security establishment had to act with much greater transparency.

Be that as it may, by and large, the Israeli press and electronic media have known most of the time to steer a fairly responsible middle course, that understood how to maintain the core of press freedom, without having to jeopardize serious security considerations. It was on such key issues that the pivotal role of the editor became and still is vital. There are numerous cases that can substantiate this assumption.

Suffice it though, to recall the dramatic days of June and July 1976, when Palestinian terrorists, aided by German “Red Army” fighters, hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris and forced it to land in Entebbe, Uganda. The 104 Israeli passengers, as well as a number of other Jewish passengers on board, were kept as hostages at the old airport of Entebbe, while the other passengers and crew members were released. Initially encouraged by some newspapers, the families of the hostages increased their pressure on Yitzhak Rabin’s first Government to negotiate with the hijackers. In an unusual meeting with the editors, Rabin, joined by the heads of the IDF, the Mossad and the Security Services, appealed to the media to refrain from giving expression to demands to negotiate and to tone down considerably reports of demonstrations by the families. Rabin’s convincing argument was that such protests weaken Israel’s position in secret contacts with representatives of the hijackers. There were also hints that these secret talks could serve to gain time for preparations of possible military action.

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Another, totally different example of the pivotal role of the editor, regarding the practically untouchable, creative freedom of a newspaper’s cartoonist, could be taken from my own personal experience. The Jerusalem Post had for many years a well-known cartoon strip, called “Dry Bones.” Because of its popularity, we eventually gave its creator, Ya’acov Kirshen, each week a full page in the Friday Magazine, where he could create various cartoons, which often had political connotations. Kirshen had come to Israel in the sixties and like many new immigrants, he had many dealings with the Jewish Agency’s Department for “Aliya” – Immigration. At one stage, he even went to the U.S. on a lecture tour on behalf of the Jewish Agency as a “successful immigrant.”

For some reason, a falling-out had developed between Kirshen and the head of the Immigration Department. Much to my surprise, I discovered on a certain Thursday on a proof sheet, just before the Friday Magazine was going to press, that the cartoonist’s entire page that week dealt with his personal feud with the man, who headed the Jewish Agency’s Immigration Department at the time. In view of this gross abuse of the cartoonist’s creative freedom for his own personal vendetta, I pulled out that page without any hesitation, just before the printing presses were to roll and substituted it with a so-called “house-ad”. Kirshen protested without success and left The Jerusalem Post several months later for a rival publication.

The editor of the provincial Danish newspaper, which last year published insulting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, should have acted similarly and exercise his authority in restraining his cartoonist in this case, instead of claiming the totally independent freedom of expression of his cartoonist.

Israel’s press and media landscsape has indeed come a long way, since the days when Israel’s main radio station, Kol Yisrael, was merely a department in the Prime Minister’s Office, that was then run by Teddy Kollek, who could call up the director of the radio and demand to withdraw immediately a news item which was not to his liking. Similarly, who still remembers today that Israeli television could start only in 1968, twenty years after the founding of the State, because David Ben-Gurion, who retired in 1963, fiercely opposed the advent of television in Israel, on the grounds that it would commercialize Israel’s society and would alienate the Israeli public from ideals and classic values. Little did Ben-Gurion realize how correct his premonitions were at the time.

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Today, the days of the once famous party newspapers like the labour movment’s “Davar” and “Al Hamishmar”, or the middle-class paper of the then conservative General Zionist Party “Haboker” are long gone. Only the three religious parties continue the tradition of financing their own party newspapers, which only rarely draw public attention, while Israel’s three main Hebrew newspapers are privately owned.

The one exception was and still is the English-language Jerusalem Post which was founded in December 1932 by Gershon Agronsky (Agron) and Ted Lurie as The Palestine Post and continues to appear ever since, albeit under changing editorial directions. Its main aim at the time was to explain to the thousands of British Mandate officials and to the Arab intelligentsia of Palestine what the original goals of the Mandate and of the slowly growing “Yishuv” were, namely the creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. With the founding of the State the Post remained loyal primarily to the policy of the founding fathers of Israel in the Labour movement. When the Likud formed its first Government in May 1977 under Prime Minister Menahem Begin, and Labour was relegated for the first time in 29 years to the role of the opposition, my colleague as Co-Editor, Erwin Frenkel, and myself made every effort to maintain a fair, factual and balanced reporting stance, while confining any criticism of Government policy to our editorials and opinion pages.

Supporting some of the main points of the Likud Government’s policy was made much easier than one could have expected, following the historic visit to Jerusalem of Egypt’s President Sadat in November 1977 and the subsequent Peace Treaty with Egypt that was signed in Washington in March 1979. The leading Trio of Prime Minister Begin’s Government, together with his Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and his Defence Minister Ezer Weizman, had created entirely new political alignments.

In April 1989, The Jerusalem Post became the first Israeli newspaper to be owned by a foreign publisher, the Canadian “Hollinger Corporation”, which had bought the majority shares of “The Palestine Post” company, as it is called to this day, from a “Histadrut” – Trade Union owned industrial concern. The former Canadian proprietors, Conrad Black and David Radler, who face stiff sentences these days by a Chicago court, because of embezzlement of company-owned funds, spared no financial effort at the time and paid nearly 20 million dollars for the sole control of The Jerusalem Post, instead of the some four million dollars offered by financially appropriate rival bids. The main aim of the new Canadian investors was to support the nationalist policy of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Despite repeated manifestations by the new Canadian owners “how proud they were to have The Jerusalem Post and its editors as another flagship in their Hollinger Corporation”, the newly appointed “President and Publisher” – a title never used before by an Israeli newspaper – retired army Colonel Yehuda Levy soon demanded that I should advance my retirement. He had David Radler’s full backing, although I had been told by him that he certainly would want me to stay on. By the time my colleagues on the editorial staff realized that they should protest against my removal, lest it might hit them soon as well, it was too late. By the end of November 1989, I had carried out night after night dozens of boxes with my papers and books. For the paper of November 30, 1989, I wrote a note of farewell underneath the editorial and removed my name and title “Editor and Managing Director” from the paper’s mast-head. Two months later, in January 1990, some 25 leading editors and journalists walked out from the Post. Most of them soon found good positions with various Israeli newspapers. We must have done something right at The Jerusalem Post, when it was a true liberal newspaper that sought a peaceful compromise with the Palestinians.

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Meanwhile, the daily English edition of Ha’aretz, which is very well translated and does have a very good website, has made deep inroads into the circulation of The Jerusalem Post.

Another “stand-alone” exception in Israel’s newspaper landscape is the daily financial paper “Globs” which is published in the afternoon, after the closing of the Tel Aviv stock exchange, and has carved out its own niche for the past years. It is home-delivered to thousands of subscribers in the greater Tel Aviv area.

But in today’s tradition of media conglomerates the world over, Israel’s three main newspapers, the liberal “Ha’aretz” – “The Land,” and the mass-circulation papers “Ma’ariv” – “Evening,” and “Yediot Aharonot” – “Latest News,” are owned respectively by three families, the Schocken, Nimrodi and Moses families, with cross ownerships in the two, privately owned television channels and dozens of weekly local papers.

Ratings, scoops and often neck-to-neck competition are the name of the game, while the only publicly-owned television channel has to struggle for its survival. Like in many other spheres, only sixty years after its establishment, Israel’s pioneering spirit and its striving for a more egalitarian society has long become a thing of the past.