Yair Golan—chairman of Israel’s “The Democrats” party—vowed recently that if elected to head the next government, he would immediately shut down what he referred to as the “propaganda” network, Channel 14.
His announcement was ridiculous for two reasons. The most obvious one is that the chances of his replacing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm of the country are nil.
Another is that Channel 14 is a private enterprise with a massive viewership and advertising revenue. It just happens to be openly conservative. And Golan, a former deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces—who didn’t spare the troops his radical views when he was still in uniform—is a far-left ideologue who’s been a vociferous leader of the anti-government protest movement.
In this sense, his choice of the name “The Democrats” is inadvertently fitting. He seems to think that it evokes “democracy.” Actually, however, it sounds more like a clone of the American Democratic Party. Which is to say that its values and platform are woke, but not liberal by any definition—and that hypocrisy and double standards are fundamental to its ethos.
Naturally, then, Golan and his allies see no problem with aiming to cancel Channel 14, while raising hell over the proposed closure of Galei Tzahal, Israel’s Army Radio.
Galei Tzahal began as a military broadcaster, designed to serve soldiers and the public during wartime and national emergencies. Over the years, it evolved, and then metastasized, into something else entirely: a political incubator and cultural gatekeeper with a profile bearing little resemblance to that of the average Israeli voter.
The problem is compounded by the fact that it’s funded from the Defense Ministry budget, which should be allocated for sorely needed equipment and crucial training, among other requirements for running an efficient military.
Furthermore, the IDF is a people’s army. Its soldiers come from religious and secular homes—from the center and the periphery, from right, left and everything in between.
Yet the radio station created for them decades ago has become overtly dismissive of the views held by the majority of the men and women who serve the country as a duty and a privilege. A broadcaster that exploits the army’s budget to advance a narrow political agenda has no business being—well—in business.
On the other hand, neither does any media outlet anywhere. Indeed, the whole concept of state subsidizing content is anachronistic, particularly with the plethora of news and features on the internet.
Nor is this a free-speech issue. No journalist will be silenced if Galei Tzahal ceases to exist. Nobody’s opinion will be off-limits. Everyone will be at liberty to say, write or podcast whatever he or she wants—just not at the taxpayer’s expense.
The same principle is now playing out in the United States. Following the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw federal funding for public broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—the congressionally chartered body that historically funneled taxpayer money to PBS and NPR—has reportedly opted to dissolve itself, acknowledging that without federal appropriations, it can’t continue to function in any meaningful way.
Meaningful? Is that what the spewers of radical ideology call what they’ve been feeding their viewers and listeners?
Predictably, the response has been gloomy, to put it mildly, as though public discourse won’t survive without government underwriting.
Those in a tizzy over it aren’t really worried about the fate of “discourse.” They’re concerned about competition in the marketplace of ideas, which rewards relevance, not self-righteousness and outdated virtue-signaling.
The irony here is worth mentioning. If public broadcasters hadn’t drifted so aggressively into progressive activism, they might never have become targets in the first place. Their transformation into what increasingly resembles a Bolshevik echo chamber made this reckoning inevitable.
Which brings us back to Golan.
A politician who openly threatens to shut down a private television station has no standing to invoke free speech in defense of a state-funded one. Nor do his fans, who consider the loss of subsidies and the existence of opposing views to be the demise of democracy.
