Minister slams public broadcaster document rating journalists’ looks, skills

Communications Minister Ayoub Kara on Friday condemned the public broadcast corporation Kan following the publication of an investigative report which revealed a document containing offensive remarks written by members of the Kan management about some former employees of the Israel Broadcasting Authority.

“It is inappropriate for public body managers to classify good and devoted workers, family people, and first-rate professionals,” Kara tweeted alongside a photo of the investigative report headline in Israeli daily Haaretz. “At the beginning of this week, I will demand clarification from the heads of the corporation.”

The report revealed a slew of remarks about journalists written in a Kan review paper aimed at determining which professionals would be absorbed into the newly formed corporation following the dismantling of the Israel Broadcasting Authority. Israeli news anchor Amir Ivgi, for example, was referred to as “ugly” by the writers of the Kan document, while veteran journalist Merav Miller, a former IBA news anchor, was characterized as “not particularly talented.”

The report further cited at least five sources who participated in the absorption process by which workers were transferred from the now-defunct Israel Broadcasting Authority to the new Kan broadcaster. The sources described how tenders for positions in the new corporation were set up in such a way as to ensure that certain journalists would not meet the requirements and would thus not be hired.

Following the publication of the document, Yair Tarchitzky, the chairman of the Journalists’ Union, demanded that the Kan board immediately suspend its CEO Eldad Koblenz.

“We expect the CEO to be suspended until the full facts are clarified,” Tarchitzky wrote in a letter to the corporation board, according to Channel 10 News. “We demand clarifications as to who is responsible for the offending comments, the use of the file, and how it is intended to deal with this conduct, as well as the other flaws that were revealed in the investigation, including the claims for tailor-made tenders.”

Meanwhile, Omer Ben-Ruby, the manager of Israel Radio, which is part of Kan, contacted the station’s employees and assured them in a letter that every “recruitment was completely businesslike and not based on lists, recommendations or slander.”

Kan issued a response according to which, “during the establishment period [of the corporation], only professional and relevant information was used. Any other information described in the [Haaretz] article was not relevant at any stage in the recruitment and construction proceedings and certainly not in official documents of the corporation. The process of selecting employees was done only within legal frameworks and only on the basis of professional considerations, and errors that were made were corrected and dealt with.”

The IBA was established in 1948 and held a monopoly on TV and radio broadcasting in Israel until the 1990s. In 2014, the government voted to shut the public broadcaster and open Kan in its stead, in an attempted reform amid a long and acrimonious political debate over the role of the institution.