Adelson ‘never’ tells Israel Hayom staff what to write

Nobody from the Adelson family has ever told journalists working for Israel’s largest circulation newspaper, the free daily Israel Hayom, what to write, Sheldon Adelson said Tuesday.

He also said he only speaks to the newspaper’s editor when he visits Israel, about four times a year.

Speaking to the Macau Daily Times, the casino and newspaper magnate, whose net worth Forbes magazine estimates at $24.5 billion (NIS 96.2 million), said: “We have about 200 journalists at the Israel Today [the English name for Israel Hayom] newspaper. You could call any one of them and you say, ‘Did anybody from the Adelson family ever tell you what to write or what not to write?’ and they will tell you, ‘No.’ If somebody’s going to write something bad about me and there’s no justification for it, I won’t know about it until after it’s done.”

Adelson told the paper in the Chinese gambling city of Macau, where he opened the massive Sands Macao casino in 2004, that he bought Israel Hayom “because the [main] newspaper there was so far to the left politically that it was misleading the public and I had a meeting with the owner and he said he didn’t want me to be a competitor.

“I said, ‘Well, just go to the center politically.’ He said, ‘I’m already to the right.’ I said, ‘No you’re not, you’re to the left.’ So anyway, I set up [Israel Hayom] and my basic business model was to give it out free and survive on advertising, which is what I’m doing. I bought a printing plant. I buy my paper and newsprint and I print my own newspapers. I’ve got [hundreds of] employees, but you know how often I talk to the editor? Just when I go there about four times a year. I never call them.”

Adelson, who founded the Israeli paper in 2007, is noted for his right-wing views. In November 2014, he told the Israeli American Council in Washington that “the Palestinians are an invented people” and that “the purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel.”

He is a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and various pro-Israel and right-wing groups, as well as a contributor to the Republican Party and to causes such as Birthright and Yad Vashem.

He is widely seen as using Israel Hayom to increase popular support for the Israeli leader.

In 2014, after Adelson had acquired two more Israeli papers, Maariv and the conservative weekly Makor Rishon, the former economy minister and current Education Minister Naftali Bennett likened Israel Hayom to Pravda, the state newspaper of the former Soviet Union.

In November of 2014, Zionist Union MK Eitan Cabel sponsored a bill to force Israel Hayom to start charging its readers. Cabel said the aim was not to close the paper, but rather to prevent the closure of the rest of Israel’s newspapers, which could not compete with a free daily. He also claimed that the paper’s pro-Netanyahu stance was effectively an undeclared donation to the prime minister’s publicity budget. The bill never went further than a preliminary Knesset reading, which it passed.

Several Israeli analysts have said that the bill may have been one of the main reasons for Netanyah’s decision in late 2014 to disband his coalition and call new elections.

Adelson has never been shy about using his wealth to advance his political interests.

In 2012, he was a generous supporter of the failed US presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich dropped out, Adelson threw his support behind Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, donating $20 million to a Romney-supporting super PAC.

In December, he met with Donald Trump, the front-runner for the current Republican nomination for the presidential elections, after which Adelson said he had not yet decided which candidate to back in the presidential race.