At the Last Minute, Israel’s Media Market Was Reshaped to Satisfy Political and Foreign Pressures
In mid-April, the situation in the special committee approving the Broadcasting Bill reached a breaking point. After weeks in which the committee chair, MK Gali Distel Atbaryan, ignored the recommendations of her legal advisory team about changes that needed to be made to the bill’s wording, the former communications minister decided to explain to the advisers how wrong they were: “You are delaying the committee, you are working against me, you are reporting against me inside the group.” Attorney Pinchas Gort replied, “We see that there is no need for legal advice here.” He and his colleagues, attorneys Naama Menachemi and Mazal Matsalawi, gathered their papers, stood up and left the committee room. The incident, apparently unprecedented in the history of the Knesset, is an extreme outward sign of the deliberations over the past few months on preparing the bill for its second and third readings. Ignoring the recommendations of the professional staff, changing the wording and handing it to committee members shortly before the debate, inserting significant financial benefits for broadcasting entities favored by the government, almost complete submission to the demands of the Communications Ministry in a way that turns the Knesset into a rubber stamp, at one point even yielding to the dictates of the Trump administration, and doing whatever was required to complete the legislation before the worst Knesset in Israel’s history ends its term. All of this was done with one goal, to reshape the media landscape, mainly by reducing free media, increasing outlets dependent on the government, and handing out favors to bodies that act as mouthpieces for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his envoys. Last week, the Knesset plenum approved a move to split the bill, in order to make it easier to pass and to complete as many of the requested changes as possible before the end of the Knesset’s term. This moment is a fitting point to examine what the law will do, and who the biggest winners and losers will be.
One of the most dangerous points in the law was the creation of a new broadcasting regulator, the Broadcasting Communications Authority, intended to replace the Cable and Satellite Council and the Second Authority for Television and Radio, most of whose members on the governing council are appointed through a politically controlled process by the Communications Ministry. Under the original draft of the bill, the new authority would in practice have the power to shut down commercial broadcasting entities on the basis of broad grounds subject to wide interpretation, such as “substantial harm” to a person or a “way of life.” Under the split version of the bill, this power is taken away from the new authority, and in fact it is stripped of almost all the powers in the original draft, except for oversight of original productions. Instead, it is stipulated that the Second Authority will not be shut down and will retain its supervisory authority over the broadcasting entities under its responsibility, with all the powers that entails, except for original productions. In addition, it will handle the largely technical process, after the split, of managing the register of content providers, which will replace the current licensing regime. Although the Broadcasting Communications Authority is left with only limited powers, some of them largely symbolic, the bill still allocates it an annual budget of NIS 12.5 million in 2027 and NIS 25 million starting in 2028. This amount is the same as the sum allocated to the regulator in the original bill. Funding for the authority will come from the vehicle license fee collected by the Transport Ministry. The result is an absurd situation, instead of reducing the number of regulators, the bill adds another regulator, almost entirely without powers, but one that still receives the same budget it would have had under the broad powers granted to it in the original wording. One can take comfort in the fact that the power to shut down broadcasting entities on the basis of broad interpretation has been taken away from it, at least for now. But even without a politically controlled regulator with the power to shut down broadcasting entities, there are still many problematic clauses in the bill’s current version.
One of the most prominent is the elimination of the independence of the news companies of the commercial broadcasters Keshet and Reshet. This is being done by changing the law’s definition of a small license holder. The definition was meant to encourage competition in the television market by granting a startup protection for new channels, exempting them from various obligations, including the establishment of a news company under structural separation intended to preserve its independence. Today, a channel is defined as a small license holder if its annual revenue does not exceed NIS 80 million. However, under the bill the revenue threshold will rise to as much as NIS 2 billion a year, which would effectively allow even the major channels to operate under this definition. The significance of this move is the abolition of the structural separation requirement between the channel owners and their news company, with no alternative mechanism to ensure a barrier between the owners and news content. The change would also eliminate the cross-ownership restriction, allowing tycoons to build media empires.
Another change will grant financial benefits worth tens of millions of shekels to the government-supporting channels 14 and i24. Under previous drafts, a channel defined as a “commercially significant provider” was required to pass its content to television providers without additional compensation. The definition of a “commercially significant provider” was supposed to be determined according to the channel’s annual revenue, with the new broadcasting council setting the required revenue threshold. However, in the split draft the definition was changed, and from now on the clause will apply only to a channel whose annual revenue exceeds NIS 600 million. This threshold is estimated to include Keshet and Reshet, but not the government-supporting channels 14 and i24. By a complete coincidence, the updated wording was presented one day after Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi appeared in a friendly interview on Channel 14.
Alongside the problematic additions, many important clauses were split out of the bill. One of the most prominent is the regulation of prohibited content, which includes a ban on broadcasting sex involving violence, abuse and exploitation, or sex with a minor, and a ban on incitement to racism. Also removed was the clause dealing with news providers, which among other things required them to formulate an ethics code to regulate issues such as disclosure, prevention of deception and ethics in advertising messages. In this context, the clause granting the new broadcasting council the authority to set rules for integrating and labeling sponsored content in channel broadcasts was also removed. Another removed clause would have required broadcasters to include emergency message distribution systems, at the request of Home Front Command or the police. Various protections for minors were also removed from the bill, including a ban on hidden advertising in children’s programs and giving the council authority to set rules to protect minors from sexual and violent content, for example by limiting the hours during which such content may be broadcast on broadcast channels.
In addition, the bill’s requirement that international content providers, such as Netflix, HBO and Disney+, transfer a portion of their revenue in Israel to original productions was removed. It turned out that this change was made in response to a request that Donald Trump conveyed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The prime minister decided to remove it because it is a demand that came from the president of the United States,” the communications minister explained in a committee debate in March.
