From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Journalists tell Knesset the government is endangering free press: ‘Scared for freedom of speech’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is endangering the free press, journalists say at an emergency gathering on freedom of expression in the Knesset.
“We feel that the free media is under a very sharp attack,” Channel 12 news presenter Oded Ben-Ami tells lawmakers, comparing a country without a free press to a hospital whose doctors do not have access to stethoscopes or MRI machines.
“We are the stethoscope of a democratic state and if you harm us, this state… won’t be able to exist,” he says.
“Where journalists are flagged for their political positions, arrests will follow,” weighs in Yedioth Ahronoth journalist Merav Betito, referring to a list circulated by Likud activists in recent days that scored Kan public broadcaster journalists on the basis of their political opinions.
The gathering was organized by Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, himself a former journalist, to protest a series of moves that critics say are aimed at eroding press freedoms, including recent legislative initiatives to grant the government oversight of television ratings data and privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation and Army Radio. In addition, the government has called for a boycott of the left-wing Haaretz daily.
Michal Assulin, Kan’s music editor, tells the committee that this is not the first time that the government has taken aim at Israel’s public broadcaster, recalling the closure of its predecessor, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, in 2017.
“I’m scared for freedom of speech,” she says. “Please don’t take my home.”
