Communications Minister MK Shlomo Karhi presented on Wednesday a revamped plan for a partial privatization of Israel’s Public Broadcasting Corporation, known as Kan, according to which its news section will be privatized but its original content section will remain state-funded.
According to the plan, Kan’s news branch will be shut down completely, and its main news radio station, Kan Reshet Bet, will be privatized, and its budget will be cut from NIS 800 million to NIS 500 million, much of which will go towards cultural content on its main television channel, Channel 11.
Kan’s educational television will remain; its Arabic news and content channel, 33, will be shut down; and Kan’s non-Hebrew radio stations, in Arabic, Russian, and Amharic, will remain. Finally, Kan’s workers who will be affected by the move will receive “respectable pension conditions.”
The initiative was revealed in a contentious debate in the Knesset Economic Committee on Karhi’s policies regarding Kan on Wednesday morning.
The president of the Israel Press Council, former Supreme Court Justice Hanan Meltzer opened the meeting with sharp criticism of Karhi’s initiative.
According to Meltzer, the law dictated that Kan was independent in two ways – the budget and the content. Kan’s budget is intentionally set in law separately from the rest of the state budget, so as to prevent politicians from using budget as a leverage to threaten it not to broadcast critical content.
Meltzer argued that it was one thing to cut Kan’s budget at an equal share as the rest of government institutions, but a specific, deep cut to Kan was legally problematic, since it indicated an attempt to stifle free speech.
Karhi, who spoke after Meltzer, countered that there was no reason to maintain a public news program, since there was competition in the market and therefore market forces should determine Kan’s share. This was a lessening of government intervention, not an attempt to increase it, Karhi argued. The communications minister argued that contrary to news, there was no competitive market for original cultural Israeli content and therefore the state should continue to support it.
Deputy Attorney General Meir Levin said that privatizing Kan’s news branch means that the government is effectively shutting down a major source of information and that it was not clear that the move was constitutionally viable.
Deputy Attorney General criticizes Karhi
Levin also criticized Karhi for pushing through his policies via private members of Knesset, and not as government-sponsored bills. Government bills must go through rigorous legal examination by the attorney general’s office, while private bills do not.
Levin added that this was an indication that rather than provide fact-based, convincing evidence for the bill’s necessity, Karhi was attempting to circumvent legal oversight, which indicated that there was a “strong concern” that the motivation for the bill was criticism of the government broadcast by Kan.
Opposition MKs criticized Karhi, arguing that rather than focus on things that the public really cared about, such as freeing the hostages in Hamas captivity and countering the high cost of living, the government was spending its time attempting to suppress criticism.
MK Merav Cohen (Yesh Atid) linked the move to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing criminal trial, arguing that Netanyahu’s attempt to avoid criticism was the real motivator behind the bill.
Linor Deutsch, CEO of Lobby 99, pointed out that commercial channels are controlled by wealthy individuals who have commercial interests, which make it difficult to publish investigations or items that could negatively affect their interests.
“Public broadcasting was the only place where we managed to publish investigations on public issues that had no place in commercial channels,” Deutsch said. She said that she had thousands of examples of news items that were blocked from publishing on the commercial channels, and that Kan’s news branch was the only platform where they could be published.
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