The broadcast law proposal, advanced again on Sunday by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, presents a concrete danger to the free press in Israel and its ability to carry out its duty in a democratic society, Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara said on Sunday.
She added that the proposal itself is lacking in fundamental qualities.
The proposal, raised on Sunday for the third time in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, includes a massive reform in the audio-visual broadcast market and, if it passes, is projected to fundamentally change it.
The first time it was raised in the committee was on May 18, and since then, the Attorney-General’s Office has issued a sharp and critical advisory opinion against it. The issues it raised already, the Sunday opinion states, have not been resolved.
The opinion notes that if there were any changes to the proposal between May and Sunday, they were not done in coordination with the legal advisory – which is required by law. Karhi has said, on the background of the government’s push to fire the attorney-general, that his office would refuse to work with the legal advisory, whose representatives are present in every ministry and ensure that all legislation proposed and passed is in line with the law.
The opinion warns of “a concrete risk of influence and intervention of significant political and commercial factors” in the sphere of communications in general and in news organizations in particular. “The independence and role of news organizations in a democratic society is decisive, critical, and pivotal,” wrote Deputy Attorney-General Avital Sompolinsky in the Sunday advisory opinion.
Concerns over new broadcast law: Privatizations and minimized diversification
The greatest concern arising from the proposal is the privatization of news corporations into the hands of very few intersecting, private individuals, which would significantly minimize the diversity of the market, which is already compact.
One of the most significant inputs into the proposal’s objectives came from the Plenary of the Regulatory Authority, which is nestled under the ministry. It identified significant flaws in the proposal, particularly regarding the independence of news broadcasting and the separation between news departments and commercial interests.
The Plenary oversees and regulates licensing and supervision, policy implementation, enforcement; serves as an advisory role; and makes decisions – as a check to balance those of individual commissioners and also to ensure transparency.
“Given the Authority’s input, the Communications Ministry should have returned to the legislation table and [should] redo the proposal so that it meets the standards,” reads the opinion.
At the heart of the proposal is the move to base broadcast regulations on the principle of “technological neutrality” – to meet the fast-paced news nature of social media and the monstrosity of news consumption. Another aspect of it removes the requirement of the ministry to seek counsel with the Plenary.
Such a big change to regulations should have gone through a thorough legal check, reads the opinion, but the ministry chose to advance the legislation as-is instead.
“We emphasized that constitutional weight lies in the arrangements concerning the regulation of news, which are of decisive importance. The proposal suggests to abolish these arrangements entirely so that this sensitive area of news broadcasting – which the ministry itself justified as a segment of activity with special sensitivity requiring regulation – would remain without any regulation, unlike the situation that has prevailed since the establishment of commercial news broadcasts,” reads the opinion.
It adds, “This change is expected to make the bodies that broadcast news, as well as the newsrooms producing the content, exposed to direct influence from the political level, as well as from capital owners and other centers of power.
The intrusion of such influences into the news will harm their reliability and quality and may distort the mediation of reality to the public within the news framework, undermining the principle of democratic participation.”
These regulations, the opinion explains, have historically safeguarded editorial independence and are constitutionally important. If they are passed, news organizations would be vulnerable to political and economic influences that could harm the reliability of quality news, and the accurate mediation of reality to the public, as well as democratic participation.
The underlying concern presented in the opinion is that by abolishing regulatory safeguards, the proposal could allow political and financial interests to directly shape news content, which is unprecedented compared to the existing regulated system for commercial news broadcasts.