The Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday voted to back a bill that would privatize the Kan public broadcaster’s news division — the second piece of legislation approved by the committee within the past year aimed at shuttering the government-funded news organization.
According to its explanatory notes, the legislation sponsored by Likud MK Galit Distel Atbaryan to sell off the Kan Reshet Bet news radio station, is “the first step” toward the “abolition of public broadcasting in Israel in the field of news and current affairs in Hebrew” — a step the bill asserts would increase competition and reduce government waste.
If passed into law, the legislation would also allow for the establishment of private commercial national radio stations on frequencies previously used by the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation.
“The initiators of the bill believe that there is no reason for Israeli citizens to continue to finance out of their own pockets… this unnecessary broadcasting of news and current affairs in Hebrew,” the bill states.
Responding to the approval of her bill, which will now go to the Knesset for a preliminary reading before being sent to committee, Distel Atbaryan tweeted that “the road ahead is still long, but I intend to walk down it until the taxes of Second Israel stop funding a racist media entity that oppresses it.”
The phrase, “Second Israel,” is used by some to characterize Israel’s Mizrahi community as a minority oppressed by an ostensible Ashkenazi hegemony.
Critics on Sunday dismissed Distel Atbaryan’s bill as part of a larger coalition legislative effort to muzzle Israel’s free press.
The proposed law is “intended to terrorize the Kan news division and its staff and benefit those close to the government, who are trying to get their hands on radio frequencies that belong to the public, and on advertising shares that will benefit the wealthy at the expense of the public,” Kan said in a statement.
The Union of Journalists in Israel decried the fact that immediately after the end of the war with Iran, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had decided to “dismantle public broadcasting in Israel,” calling the bill “unconstitutional, unreasonable” and “fatal to press freedom.”
The committee on Sunday also backed a bill advanced by Likud MK Avichai Boaron aimed at limiting how much monthly advertising a given media purchasing firm may buy from any given broadcast station — a move that the legislation’s explanatory notes said would benefit smaller channels, prompting critics to assert that it is meant to assist the pro-government Channel 14.
According to Hebrew media reports, Karhi explicitly demanded that the legislation not go through the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee, whose chairman, Likud MK David Bitan, has worked to block his media overhaul efforts.
In January, Bitan announced that he would block a previous bill aimed at shutting down Kan, declaring that “public broadcasting is necessary.”
As written, that legislation would require the government to issue a tender for the purchase of the television and radio networks controlled by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), which operates Kan television and radio, among other platforms.
The proposed legislation stipulates that if a buyer cannot be found in two years, the broadcaster will be shuttered completely and its intellectual property will revert to the government.
A similar bill aimed at privatizing Army Radio by selling it off to a private buyer is also being promoted by the coalition.
“There has always been public broadcasting in Israel, so in terms of canceling the public broadcaster, I’m not in favor,” Bitan said at the time. “Unfortunately, there are those in Likud who are causing damage to the party and its members for the sake of politics, and I will not allow this.”
Bitan also pledged to freeze work on legislation that would grant the government oversight over television ratings data and force broadcasters to regularly report such data, which Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara has argued would violate key constitutional principles, including the right to privacy and freedom of the press.
In response, Karhi has proposed bypassing Bitan by forming a new committee to debate the bills and has called to “exercise coalition discipline” against Bitan.
Israel has fallen 15 spots in Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom index since the current government took power in 2022. While launching heated attacks on many Israeli media outlets, the coalition has poured money into the pro-government Channel 14, nearly quadrupling its advertising spending there over the past two years, according to news website The 7th Eye, which covers the local media sector.
Critics, including the Foreign Press Association and the Union of Journalists in Israel, have accused the government of undermining democracy, while the bills’ backers argue that their legislation would liberalize the media market and increase competition.
Since coming to power, the coalition has sought to end government advertising in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper and has promoted bills to compel Kan to justify its decisions to Bitan’s committee on an annual basis, and give the government direct control over the broadcaster’s budget.