Two weeks ago, the directors general of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Communications, Shai Babad and Shlomo Filber, met. On the agenda, as we were later told, was the ten-year old initiative to consolidate media regulation, which has once again become stuck. It now turns out that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to use this initiative to create for himself a means of controlling the new Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, branded as Kan.
The roles and status of the two men who took part in the meeting are clear, and are not limited to their official titles. Babad is Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon's right hand in solving problems like these, and there is no need to describe at length the congruence between Netanyahu's aspirations and interests in the media sector and the moves that Filber has been promoting in that area.
What is no less important, however, is who was not present at that meeting: Ministry of Finance Budgets Commissioner Amir Levy. Anyone who has followed the behavior of the Ministry of Finance in the past few months in relation to the various legislative initiatives concerning the media market cannot have failed to mark the gap between the approaches of Levy and Babad.
These differences became sharp, and public, in the discussions in the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee on the bill regulating sports broadcasting. After the representatives of the Budgets Division fought in the committee against heavy pressure brought to bear on them and consistently demanded that the legislation should be passed as part of the annual catch-all Economic Arrangements Bill (as the government had decided), the director general of their ministry turned up at one of the committee sessions and announced that he had actually become persuaded that because of the complexity of the matter it should be exclude from that bill. The surprising U-turn left the members of Knesset on the committee astonished, as the Budgets Division representatives continued to present a stance opposed to that of the director general of their own ministry.
In case you were wondering, the sports broadcasting legislation was in the end taken out of the Economic Arrangements Bill that the Knesset passed at the end of 2016. The promise made at the time was that it would be approved separately in the Economic Affairs Committee in January, but January passed and the bill designed to weaken the duopoly of Hot and Yes and allow the public cheaper access to sports content is still far from final approval.
Which brings us back to the ideas that Babad and Filber are currently mulling and concocting as part of a deal that their bosses will eventually have to strike. The unification that is obviously called for of the Second Authority for Television & Radio, which regulates channels 2 and 10 and regional radio stations, and the Council for Cable TV and Satellite Broadcasting, which regulates Yes and Hot, has been stuck for several months in the Economic Affairs Committee, chaired by opposition MK Eitan Cabel (Zionist Union).
The basic idea is of course welcome. It will mean a body that sets uniform policy for all commercial broadcasters, and also greater efficiency and savings. Under the proposals that have been discussed down the years, the united authority is supposed to be a unit within the Ministry of Communications, and its members will be appointed by the minister. This to a large extent is the situation in any case in the bodies that it is meant to replace (the Second Authority for Television & Radio is an external statutory body, but appointments to it are determined by the minister of communications).
In no scenario discussed so far, however, has it been suggested that this new body should also supervise public broadcasting. That is precisely the job of the Public Broadcasting Corporation Council, and it is hard to find any material justification in principle for such a move.
This idea, which apparently was indeed discussed at the above-mentioned meeting, should be treated at this stage as half trial balloon. After all, even the attempt to pass legislation unifying the commercial broadcasting regulators, without the Public Broadcasting Corporation, has failed so far. An attempt to pass it now, through lightning legislation, and at the same time force the Public Broadcasting Corporation onto it, ought to be even harder, certainly given the timetable. Kan was supposed to start broadcasting at the beginning of the year, and this has been postponed only until April 30.
Those cynical about politics will say, not without justice, that where there's a will there's a way. The start of Kan's operations can be postponed again, and the legislation on unifying the regulators can be wrested away from the recalcitrant Economic Affairs Committee - both of which moves would certainly result in petitions to the High Court of Justice.
The chances are, though, that even the justices will not save Kahlon from the situation in which he finds himself, to a large extent against his will. In the end, he will have to decide whether he will limit himself to dealing with the financial aspect of the Public Broadcasting Corporation, a stance that so far has enabled him to block Netanyahu but in which cracks will eventually be found, or whether he will also take a principled stand on the freedom and independence that public broadcasting ought properly to enjoy.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 21, 2017
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