5. Rabin’s Assassination and the following Week as Reflected in Channel One’s TV Broadcasts

IMW reviewed the broadcasting schedule of TV’s Channel One during the week
following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4,
1995 in order to ascertain the balance in those transmissions.  The
programs included in the report  were the coverage from Sunday morning
until the funeral service, two "Popolitika" shows (5.11 and 7.11), a
special tribute by artists and actors (7.11), a special retrospective
program on Rabin (8.11) and the weekly news roundup, "Yoman" (10.11).
These programs were selected for their centrality in the schedule lineup,
their importance due to their hosts and the guests and because their
relative length enabled adequate in-depth research.

Our main finding was that balance was not preserved.  The "Popolitika"
show of 5.11 included 12 guests from the leftist camp and 3 from the right.
The representatives of the left merited 71% on the discussion time.  It
was only on the second "Popolitika" show of 7.11 that a semblance of
balance was presented.  This was achieved, as the show’s moderator has
revealed (40), when the producer, Aharon Goldfinger, was forced to invite
four representatives of the left as well as right.  Nevertheless, Finance
Minister Avraham Shochat, a close political ally of Rabin, was allowed the
special privilege of being interviewed with no other guest and the panel
table for several long minutes before being joined by MK Naomi Chazan of
the coalition Meretz Party for another interview period with no one from
the right.  Despite the balance in the number of guests, the left-wing
representatives were allotted 68% of the debate time versus 32% for the
opposition members.

Another aspect regarding these two "Popolitika" shows was that the panel
interviewers acted with impunity, asking their questions in an aggressive
and belittling manner.  Their behavior was seen as a contribution to the
"brutalization of television culture", influencing in a negative manner the
general gloomy political atmosphere.

Channel One broadcast live, from the HaBimah National Theater hall, a
tribute to Rabin by many of the country's artists and performers.  Not one
representative of the right was included in the long list of stars.  Harsh
words of slander and libel were spoken, some in a menacing manner, causing
complaints to be made to the Attorney-General’s office.  Mordechai
Kirschenbaum was reported to be on the verge of pulling the plug on the
show but permitted it to continue.  A central guest who addressed those
assembled was Minister Shulamit Aloni, a very opinionated person in her own
right.  No other political personality appeared.  The show served as a
platform for politically motivated attacks with no modicum of fairness by
the public broadcasting network to allow for a true presentation of their
views..

Another special program, shown that week, was "Goodbye to Rabin" on
November 8, 1995.  Not one right wing representative appeared.  There were
four left-wingers and one PLO representative, Ziad Abu-Ziad.  This was a
sorry week for broadcasting ethics and was summed up by Chaim Assa, a
former Rabin analyst who worked as a government employee in the Prime
Minister’s bureau, in a newspaper opinion piece:

"The way the media stars smeared themselves on to the difficult atmosphere
that was formed brings to mind desperation. Instead of fulfilling its role
- to
be a platform for neutral public debate, it became a party to that dispute.
Despite the fact that the majority of Israel’s media are positioned on the
side that I believe in,   I find it hard to express my own mind".  (41)

The ever-perceptive Meiberg described Channel One’s efforts that week as a
conscious decision of  "managing the mourning". (42)

The media hounded, in a private war carried on through the use of public
instruments, against Benjamin Netanyahu in particular and the National Camp
(43) in general.  An incisive view of this vendetta was provided by Tamir
Shefer, a lecturer at the Hebrew University’s Communications Department and
a doctoral student, in an article published in the Ha’Aretz newspaper which
dealt with the mourning activity of the media over Rabin’s death.
According to Shefer,

"The media coverage after the assassination created a contextual paradigm
of a special character - the ‘paradigm of incitement’...the two
representative narratives which formulated this ‘paradigm of incitement’
are the ‘coffin
demonstration’ [a demonstration that took place in Raanana in the presence of
Netanyahu in which a coffin symbolized the "death of peace".  Netanyahu
denied seeing the coffin’s inscription] and the "Zion Square rally" [in
Jerusalem
during which a photo montage of Rabin in an SS uniform was displayed before
television cameras]".  (44)

Shefer’s article was written in response (45) to a third narrative which
occurred in May 1998 when supporters of Jerusalem’s Betar soccer team won
the league championship.  The celebrations were held at Safra Square in the
presence of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the mayor, Ehud
Olmert.  Television camera microphones picked up chants of "death to
Arabs!" from a portion of the crowd.  Despite Netanyahu’s denial, together
with Olmert, that they had not heard the chants from their position on a
balcony overlooking the square, a claim backed by press reporters, Israel’s
Channel One showed a few seconds of Netanyahu waving to the crowd together
with the chants in the background.  The inevitable image conveyed was that
Netanyahu was, as it were, encouraging the crowd’s chants.  In her
commentary, news presenter Geula Even left no doubt that she had linked
this event with the previous event in Zion Square.  That event, as noted
above, was central to the incitement thesis in that there, too, Netanyahu
had stated that he had not seen the posters from where he was standing even
though television shots created the image and sense that he was smiling in
direct reaction to the posters.  Netanyahu, the media was unmistakably
conveying, was a secret partner to the incitement.

The clear, and perhaps planned, conclusion of the week’s broadcasting was
that not only was the public allowed to know what was going on and thereby
participate in the mourning over the tragic death of the country’s leader
and that not only did the media act as an agent which allowed the public to
experience psychologically the difficult circumstances such as the tearful
remarks spoken by Rabin’s daughter but the media managed a mobilized
campaign of a certain cultural, social and ideological elite against a
group hostile to that elite as well as hated by that elite.

The media, posits Shefer, mourned in two spheres.  "Firstly, the media
engaged in self-flagellation.  And example of this is Michael Karpin’s
documentary ("The Government Announces With Shock") that blames the press
directly for ignoring the obvious signs that indicated an incitement
campaign...and the second expression of media’s mourning was an increased
awareness that highlighted in a massive media coverage of every item and
instance that could be associated with incitement...the problem in this
mode of activity (that is, the review and categorization of events
according to their appropriateness to existing media paradigms) created a
mental fixation and invited stereotyping".

In addition, Shefer relates to the problematic that the media must
shorten, classify edit and present an event by showing a sample of the
reality.  Journalists are those who, by their roles, create the contexts in
which the event will be displayed.  In this professional process, several
questions should be asked, such as:

"who is permitted to decide when a sample represents the reality?  When are
created contexts legitimate?  When is it proper to assign an event to the
existing
media paradigm and when is it correct to disassemble that paradigm?".

In the current situation of the Israel media, when many of its central
personnel hold opinions that negate the political path of Netanyahu, the
clash between the personal biases and the rules of professional ethics has
brought about a depreciation of those rules.  The cameras and the
microphones in the hands of those media people have served the editors,
broadcasters and hosts as tools to bring before the viewers and listeners
their own personal outlooks while, at every possible moment, battering the
National Camp and he who stands at its head.

A display of that depreciation of the code of ethics by a media person was
provided in a book review article criticizing the new addition of the IBA’s
code, the Nakdi Document.  In the article, written by a former IBA employee
and currently, a lecturer in media studies at the Hebrew University, Dr.
Yitzhak Roeh, the code was termed "an anachronistic document", which "stirs
up but merciful empathy" as "an ancient legend" being "irrelevant". (46)