When Professor Eytan Sheshinski and his committee started deliberating on the royalties that gas companies would have to pay, most analysts believed that if the findings would be pro-big business, they would not be adopted. When it became clear that the committee would recommend taking billions from the tycoons, the analysts predicted that the government would disregard the committee's findings.
I can still recall the pundits saying that the tycoons had nothing to worry about, and there was no chance of the findings being embraced by the cabinet.
Then, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually embraced the findings. All of them.
None of the pundits expressed remorse, nor did they do the obvious thing and say, "Sorry, I was wrong." After all, this does not fit the thesis they had established about Netanyahu and the tycoons.
And then there was the revamping of the telecommunications industry. Monthly mobile phone bills of 500 shekels ($138) shrank to a fifth or even a tenth of that sum. The mobile carriers saw their profits nosedive, and the tycoons suddenly had to part ways with billions of shekels.
But the tycoons took note. It seems as though the tycoons, some of whom are friends, sympathizers or associates of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, found refuge at their in-house publication, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Just this past weekend, it had one of "the friendlies" featured on the cover of one of its supplements. His name is Beny Steinmetz. According to various business news sites, the billionaire is now in dire straits because the authorities in Africa are questioning whether he obtained his mining concessions illicitly.
So here you have it: Yedioth Ahronoth's publisher Arnon (Noni) Mozes once again uses his tilting mechanism to slant the news in someone's favor. In this case, the biased reporting can be traced to the fact that Steinmetz is an associate of Ehud Olmert, who is an associate of Mozes. So, is it purely coincidental that the buddy of a convicted former premier appeared on the cover of a supplement in the latter's in-house paper (Olmert's partial acquittal was appealed by the State Prosecution, with the Supreme Court taking up the case on Tuesday)?
Yedioth Ahronoth would just kill to catch Netanyahu red-handed. Finally, last week, the mission was accomplished. They had a scoop: There is a cigarette vending machine on the eighth floor of the Prime Minister's Office, near the cafeteria. The paper noted that there is nothing illegal about that, but when you scour the land in search of something with which to besmirch Netanyahu, you use whatever ammunition you can find. Even if that means reporting ludicrous allegations; even if that means that sensational headlines with large font end in a whimper; even if this just results in the prime minister being discredited and Israel being tarnished on the world stage.
Because this is how the tilting mechanism works. Noni Mozes knows full well that Netanyahu does not cozy up to the tycoons who are under investigation in Africa, but he is willing to rake in billions from the gas overlords and from the telecommunications moguls. Come to think of it, it is actually those in Mozes' kingdom who like the tycoons; it seems as though they speak a common language. Netanyahu is not part of that bunch.
He is an outsider. Yedioth just doesn't like anyone who is not "one of our own."
טעינו? נתקן! אם מצאתם טעות בכתבה, נשמח שתשתפו אותנו