Coalition panel gives thumbs-up to bill aimed at selling off Kan news division

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation votes to give coalition backing to a bill that would privatize the Kan public broadcaster’s news division.

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” — something which the bill asserts would increase competition and reduce government waste.

“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.

“The road ahead is still long but I intend to walk it until the tax money of Second Israel stops funding a racist media entity that oppresses it,” tweets Distel Atbaryan — using a phrase referring to Israel’s Sephardic community as a minority oppressed by an Ashkenazi hegemony.

Critics allege the move is one of several aimed at muzzling Israel’s press.

The legislation is “intended to terrorize the Kan news division and its people and benefit those close to the government, who are trying to get their hands on radio frequencies that belong to the public, and advertising shares that will benefit the wealthy at the expense of the public,” Kan says in a statement.

The first thing that Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to do after the end of the war with Iran was to “dismantle public broadcasting in Israel,” the Journalists Association says, calling the bill “unconstitutional, unreasonable” and “fatal to press freedom.”