The Knesset will discuss the future of Channel 10, Israel’s second commercial television channel, in a Monday session of the Finance Committee.
The channel will cease broadcasting in mid-August, according to its management. It is in financial dire straits and its owners appear loath to bail it out, despite generous offers of assistance from the government. Some nationalists see the channel’s woes as the result of the fact that its news shows do not offer the public an alternative to the other left-leaning mainstream media channels.
The channel, which began broadcasting in 2002, has proven to be a bad investment. Its shareholders have reportedly sunk more than NIS 1 billion into attempts to make the channel float but it continues to show poor rating numbers, far below those of Channel 2.
Investors have had enough?
With Channel 10 facing impending closure and in debt for about NIS 50 million, its employees held a protest outside the Knesset last Tuesday, in an attempt to put pressure on Communication Minister Moshe Kahlon to come to the rescue. Kahlon and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz agreed to a generous aid package in which the government would lend the channel NIS 30 or 40 million, and the channel would come up with NIS 10 or 20 million in cash.
According to a report in TheMarker, however, sources close to the negotiations said that Channel 10’s investors refuse to put any more money into it. “They are being offered generous installment plans and they do not want to give anything,” one source said. Another source added: “it looks as though they are trying to trip up the negotiations.”
Channel 10 employees protest outside Knesset (Israel news photo: Flash 90).
Yossi Maiman, the majority shareholder in Channel 10, will take part in Monday's committee discussion. He told a news conference last Monday that he would stop funding the channel at the end of July. "My shoulders are just not broad enough," Maiman said. He said that the decision was a joint one, and included his partners Arnon Milchan, Ron Lauder and Rupert Murdoch.
Nationalist investor driven away
In one of the channel’s previous crises, an orthodox Jewish investor from Mexico, Moshe Saba, offered to buy a controlling share. However, this offer raised objections from elements that feared Saba would inject nationalistic and religious content into the channel, and eventually foundered. A former investor, Shlomo Ben-Tzvi, is identified with nationalist views but was forced to sign a commitment not to interfere in the channel’s content before joining.
Nationalists in Israel have been eyeing the channel for a long time, in the hope that it could be turned into “Israel’s Fox News” – that is, a channel with unabashedly patriotic content, including a news department that offered an approach to the news that was more “fair and balanced” (as Fox's slogan goes), as an alternative to the rest of the mainstream media, which is perceived as very left-leaning.
Writing in Haaretz, veteran nationalist journalist Yisrael Harel opined that Channel 10’s failure is a result of the fact that it is nothing but an imitation of Channel 2, and its news department even “outflanks… Channel 2 from the left.”
The Tel Avivian clique
The way to save the network, Harel said, would be “to change its content wholesale.” But “only those individuals from a world that is completely antithetical to the world of content and values as exemplified by the Tel Avivian clique can turn it around,” he added. “The investors - whether the current investors or the new batch of investors - need to internalize the fact that Israeli television viewers love their country, their army and their state no less than American viewers. If they dare, Channel 10 could become the new Fox News of Israel."
Media analyst Hani Luz, writing in Besheva, called Channel 10 “a genetic clone” of Channel 2. She noted that only last Saturday evening, newscaster Oshrat Kotler-Bengal presented an opinion item in which she compared IDF soldiers who turn away Sudanese immigrants at the border with Egypt to Swiss authorities who turned away Jews who escaped from Nazi Germany. In the past, Kotler called for negotiations with Hamas and donned a Muslim headscarf for an interview of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin, who was later killed by an IAF missile.
If attempts to save the channel in its current form fail, Luz said, the future is not clear. There could be a tender for a new owner in August, or the channel could close down for good.