Israel’s IBA English TV news announces its own demise

The Israel Broadcast Authority’s daily English-language news announced its demise by posting a death notice online.

Efrat Battat, one of only two journalists still formally on the IBA English staff, said the news has been off the air since Thursday, because they no longer have the manpower to produce the program.

Battat met with management on Monday morning, and said the service is now formally off-air until further notice. Nonetheless, she said, the last remaining staff were still holding on to a hope of revival; she described the posting of the death notice as a protest action.

A spokesman for the IBA confirmed that, because of staff shortages and a ban on hiring, “to our great sorrow, the IBA cannot produce further editions of the English news.”

Five of the seven-strong team took voluntary retirement at the start of the month, as the entire IBA entered crisis mode amid acute confusion over a controversial process of economic reform under which the state broadcaster is supposed to close down, shed hundreds of jobs and then be reconstituted.

Battat said the five staffers who left might have stayed on if there had been some sort of guarantee of work until March 31, when the new corporation is supposed to be established. But no such assurances were forthcoming, and nor have any decisions been taken as to whether the new corporation will include English news broadcasts.

Management, upon being told that two people could not produce the English broadcasts, rejected the suggestion that that some ex-staff be brought back, she said.

The entire IBA is also grappling with much-reduced staffing and resources: The main Mabat Hebrew news broadcast is functioning on 40% less manpower, including directors, camera crews, sound, and graphics. Weather forecaster Sharon Wechsler has been doing her forecasts simply sitting next to anchorman Ya’akov Eilon, sometimes with no slides and no graphics.

“Nobody gave any thought to what would happen when most of the English staff left,” IBA’s English News Editor Steve Leibowitz, one of the five who took a retirement package at the start of the month, told The Times of Israel two weeks ago. He called the IBA English News “the bastard child” of the state broadcasting authority. In a period where Israel is battling against international demonization, and amid frequent talk in prime ministerial circles of the imperative for an Israeli counter to networks such as Al-Jazeera, the English News “had the potential to serve as the world’s window into Israel,” said Leibowitz. “But the government didn’t take advantage of that. It was never given the proper funding or attention.”

The English news launched 25 years ago, and had a local audience of tens of thousands of households, with many more around the world watching on Shalom TV, Christian Trinity TV and the Internet, he said.