Israel's Media Watch (IMW) Update Report #26
- January 7, 2000

-  Help needed
-  IMW news

- The High Court of Justice (Bagatz) instructed the State prosecutor's Office to provide IMW with the evidence the Eyal swearing-in ceremony
-Halaby May Be Indicted

-  Words of Wisdom
-  Media News

- In Syria's tow By David Bar-Illan
- Likud slams media silence on Nava Barak's travels By David Zev Harris

Reminder!
You may hear Rami Sadan and Yisrael Medad discussing media issues on their popular radio program "Chofesh HaShidur" (The Freedom of Broadcasting) on Arutz 7, Sunday mornings live! between 8-9AM.

Help Needed:-
IMW will be reviewing and researching the electronic media performance beginning from December 8, 1999 when the news of the reconvening of Syrian-Israeli talks broke. If any of the list members can draw our attention to media ethics infractions such as unbalanced number of guests on interview programs, personal opinion statements by broadcasters, use of loaded terms or phrases, unnecessary aggressive questioning or ridicule, et al., we would appreciate this.

IMW needs monitors, listeners and recorders to follow the Golan/Syrian Negotiation coverage.  If you can commit yourself to at least one program, call the office or e-mail a reply.

IMW News

-   IMW won a major legal victory on Thursday, January 6, 2000 when the High Court of Justice (Bagatz) instructed the State prosecutor's Office to provide IMW with the evidence from the police investigation into the charges of the broadcasting in 1995 of an inauthentic media event, suspected as staged.
The IMW petition demanded that the Court reverse the decision to close the file due to lack of evidence.  IMW's counsel, Yoram Sheftel, surprised the court with partial transcripts from the police investigation, independently obtained.  The Court, headed by Michael Cheshin, allowed the State Prosecution 15 days to fulfill the demand for providing the evidence, including the unedited, original film that was shot the evening of the event.  The partial evidence clearly indicates that the IBA TV reporter, Eitan Oren, expressed a desire to see the group act provocatively and virtually "produced" the event.
Following another 15 day period in which the State Prosecution is to
respond to the material, a new date will be set.

-  HALABY MAY BE INDICTED - Arutz 7, January 2, 2000
The police recommend that Rafik Halaby, news director of the Israel
Broadcasting Authority's Channel One television station, be indicted for bribery and breach of trust.  He is suspected of helping the Shas party in two electoral campaigns, in return for which Shas leader Aryeh Deri allegedly acted to have him appointed to his current post.  Halaby is alleged to have translated several cassettes from Arabic into Hebrew, and to have arranged parlor meetings for Shas in the Druze community of which he is a member.  Halaby admits to having translated the cassettes, but says that this is an act of mistaken judgement for which he should face internal disciplinary proceedings and not criminal charges.

Arutz-7's Ron Meir interviewed Israel Media Watch director Yisrael Medad, who has been closely following the story for months.  The interview can be heard at
www.a7.org/engclips/020100/medad-halaby.ram .

Note:  IMW demanded of Gil Samsonov, IBA Chairman and of Edna Arbel, State Prosecutor, that Halaby be suspended immediately.  A letter to Attorney-General Rubinstein last July and two more follow-ups in November have gone ignored except for a laconic note that the matter is under review.

Words of Wisdom -

"Television is democracy at its ugliest".
Paddy Chayefsky

Media News

An excerpt from
EYE ON THE MEDIA:
In Syria's tow
By
David Bar-Illan
Jerusalem Post, December 31, 1999

...What Yediot Aharonot did last Friday was probably a first in Israel. The whole front page and the following two pages, plus a continuation on an inside page of the newspaper - which on Friday appears as a broadsheet - were devoted almost exclusively to a picture story by reporter Boaz Bismout about his three-day visit to Damascus.

Had the combined forces of the Syrian ministries of Foreign Affairs and Tourism planned a propaganda brochure with which to sell the current Syrian peace campaign, they could not have done a better job.
According to Bismout, Syria's streets may not boast the latest-model cars, and its university students may be 10 years behind the times in campus fashions. But otherwise Damascus is the closest thing to Shangri-la.

It is a meticulously orderly and disciplined city...Everyone Bismout met - from soldiers to students to hotel employees to businessmen to an anonymous Foreign Office official - is waiting with bated breath to welcome rich Israeli tourists to Damascus. And they are all looking forward to their own shopping expeditions in Tel Aviv.
"It will be like Europe here, if you only return the Golan," they say with heartwarming conviction...

A TOTALITARIAN country? Not at all, asserts Bismout. Syria is quite free. Why, Syrian papers boldly reported the apprehension of the alleged serial rapist in Tel Aviv. And Bismout's phone calls to Paris were never disconnected, even when he mentioned his editor's name. And satellite dishes, though officially illegal, can be seen on every roof.

If this all sounds painfully familiar, it is because the story could have been a copy of similar tales, with variations to suit local circumstances, about the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Franco's Spain and other happy lands. Such stories were also published about Egypt circa 1980, Iraq in early 1990, and Gaza and Jericho in 1994.
...A few journalists are then allowed to visit and report what they see and hear. And since no one is more eager than Western journalists to herald the budding signs of utopian peace after years of strife and threats of war, the visit usually results in the kind of report Bismout turned in. In the euphoria of "peace at last," the unspeakable brutality of the regime is relegated to oblivion, and anyone who dares mention it is branded a hopeless warmonger.

In this case, Yediot was not only a willing collaborator in the charade - it was disingenuous in the way it presented it. It billed Bismout as "Yediot Aharonot's emissary reporting on three days in Damascus," imparting the impression he was there as a Yediot correspondent. Thus misled, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman complimented Syrian President Hafez Assad for the gesture. "To his credit," he wrote this week, "Mr. Assad allowed a reporter from Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot, to visit Damascus last week."

But Bismout traveled to Damascus on his French passport, after getting his Syrian visa in Paris. At no time did he present himself as an Israeli, either to Syrian officials in Paris or to the plain Syrians he met in Damascus. The most he revealed about himself, he says, is that he is Jewish.

If there is a silver lining in the publication of such a transparent propaganda exercise, it is in the part about the proliferation of satellite dishes. If true, this may prove the beginning of the end of the dictatorship. It was access to Western news and communications that helped effect the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism. It may do the same in the Middle East. "

Likud slams media silence on Nava Barak's travels
By
David Zev Harris
Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2000

The Likud yesterday blasted both the political Left and the media for failing to speak out against Prime Minister Ehud Barak taking his wife, Nava, with him the the United States. Surely Barak should receive the same heavy criticism that was meted out to former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu for similarly including his spouse, Sara, in his entourage, said the Likud.

"We never looked at who is travelling with the prime minister, not in the period of Rabin, Peres, Ben-Gurion, or Golda," said Likud whip Reuven Rivlin. "That seems to be the reserve of the socialists, who seem to have a set of accounts. It's amazing how they don't scream out 'Nava' like they did 'Sara.' "

Barak's spokeswoman Merav Parsi-Zadok said her office had no comment to make,
suggesting a response be obtained from the Labor Party.
"There was never a claim against Sara Netanyahu when she joined her husband on long trips," said Labor spokesman Yerah Tal. "A prime minister is entitled to his wife's support."

Labor officials, though, said they did complain when Sara Netanyahu accompanied her husband on one or two trips and further objected to her expenses such as a visit to a pricey hotel hair salon.

The feeling during the Netanyahu visits was that Sara was "high-maintenance, and therefore diverted the prime minister away from urgent matters of state - to placate his wife," said one veteran diplomatic correspondent.
In his opinion, there was more to the objections to Sara's participation than a mere debate over the use or misuse of state funds. Sara was concerned about her husband's personal life while overseas, said another reporter.

There was also a view among those traveling that it was wrong for the Netanyahus to bring their young children with them - something that does not concern the Baraks, whose children are older. One reporter recalled the junior Netanyahus "running riot" in an office of US President Bill Clinton. "It just doesn't look very good, does it?" he said.

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