So Freedom House decided that Israel's press was less free because there was a successful conservative paper. As Jonathan Tobin notes, Israel is being downgraded from Free to Partly Free because...
The group considers “the growing impact of Israel Hayom” to be a problem. According to Freedom House, that newspaper’s “owner-subsidized business model endangered the stability of other media outlets.”
Arguably the effort to outlaw Israel Hayom raised far more questions about press freedom than the actual paper.
The legislation, proposed by Labor faction chairman Eitan Cabel and signed by members of every coalition party except the Likud, would outlaw free newspapers, requiring that the lowest-priced newspaper of the four with the widest circulation cost at least 70 percent of the price of the next-lowest-priced paper.
But Freedom House has no objection to a ban on free papers. That's not a threat to press freedom. Israel Hayom is because it's owned by Sheldon Adelson. And yet Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post is not a problem. There's no concern when a liberal billionaire subsidizes a paper. There was no issue when Chris Hughes destroyed the New Republic.
We hear nothing about how many newspapers Warren Buffett owns. But when Adelson buys a paper, in the US or in Israel, it's a national crisis.
Just as Rupert Murdoch is a horrifying monster, even a James Bond villain, for having a lot of media, while Ted Turner was just a great guy and a visionary for doing much the same thing.
The technical term for this is media bias. If you have a biased media, then that media needs to maintain liberal ownership to perpetuate that bias. All of this is really obvious stuff.
Which is why Freedom House has shamed itself by launching such a cynical attack. There are plenty of issues to be raised about freedom of the press in Israel. And when it comes to owner-subsidized models, FH doesn't seem terribly interested in the financials of the Yedioth Ahronoth Group. Because it has the right politics. Israel Hayom has the wrong politics.
The owner-subsidized model is typical in Israel.
Four business groups – the Ofer family, the Dankner family, Mossi Wertheim and Yitzhak Tshuva – have holdings in media companies, including cross-ownership and diagonal ownerships whereby a company owns shares in a media company and other business interests... Multiple media ownership can lead to slanted news coverage. Professor Sam Lehman-Wilzig and Nava Sharvit of Bar Ilan University published in 1999 a study which showed how Yediot Aharonot, Ma’ariv and Haaretz slanted their reports on media companies owned by the conglomerates “Yediot Tikshoret” and “Hachsharat Hayishuv” which, in turn, own the papers.
But Freedom House is oddly uninterested in ownership issues when they involve anyone on the left. It's only an issue on the right. That's not press freedom. That's bias.