Since becoming communications minister three years ago, Shlomo Karhi has been pushing for sweeping reforms to reshape Israel’s media landscape, creating greater competition but, some argue, these moves harm press freedom and could undermine the media’s ability to provide oversight of the government.
Now, as the country moves into high gear for an election race expected to kick off in the next few months, there appears to be a rush to make those reforms a reality, even as a growing number of voices within the media and the opposition warn it will weaken Israel’s democratic nature.
In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Report, Karhi shared his vision for Israel’s media, describing a free-market structure that would parallel the broadcasting sector in the US.
“For me, the US is the model – a free market in which the state does not intervene in content, where players can arise freely,” Karhi told the Report.
Delicate balance
There has long been a delicate balance between the government and the media in Israel. Karhi’s communications reform bill, which focuses mainly on broadcasting, passed its first Knesset reading in November. It comes as additional government figures have introduced legislative changes that will impact other areas of the media.
The advancement of all these reforms, which also include ending government financing for public television and radio and banning foreign outlets overtly critical of Israel, chiefly Al-Jazeera, from operating in Israel, comes against the backdrop of the government’s contentious attempts to also reform the country’s judicial branch.
At the heart of Karhi’s proposal is the establishment of a single, unified regulatory authority that would replace the existing Second Authority for Television and Radio and the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting. The new body, according to Karhi, would regulate the supply of audiovisual content uniformly across all broadcasting platforms.
While it is widely accepted that Israel’s broadcasting sector requires change that will better reflect the realities of today’s modern media environment and rapid technological developments, the more than 100-page bill that Karhi is now fast-tracking through the Knesset, including via a specially created parliamentary committee, has raised numerous concerns and sparked widespread controversy.
Press freedom
Opposition lawmakers have sharply criticized the reform, with many warning that it is undemocratic and could be used to silence the media during a crucial election year. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, himself a former broadcast journalist, said the bill was not a reform but rather “a campaign of incitement and gagging against the free press.”
“It is a hostile takeover of the media. It is a blatant attempt to threaten and silence journalism in an election year,” Lapid said at a press conference in December.
Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara also voiced opposition to the bill, warning in September that it posed a concrete threat to press freedom and to the media’s ability to fulfill its role in a democratic society. She said the proposal lacked fundamental guiding principles.
Karhi rejects these claims. He says his reforms will have the opposite effect by opening the market to a wider range of voices, which he argues will strengthen press freedom.
“My goal is to turn Israel’s communications market from a producers’ market into a consumers’ market, where all voices are reflected: Left, Right, Center,” he told the Report.
“Today, regulation punishes channels that express different voices,” added Karhi, describing how newer news outlets – namely the more conservative, Fox-like Channel 14 and radio station Galei Israel – have been disproportionately fined for not meeting tight regulations that he argues favor older, more established outlets.
“I don’t want that,” he continued. “I don’t want to decide how much Left or Right there should be. I want the free market to reflect Israel’s mosaic freely….That is the essence of the reform.”
Market competition
Raised in an ultra-Orthodox Sephardi home in Israel’s southern periphery, Karhi, 43, has often spoken about the importance of expanding opportunities for the country’s working class. He joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party in 2019 and rose quickly through its ranks, being appointed minister following the 2022 elections.
In his interview with the Report, Karhi explained that reforming Israel’s broadcast market was not his primary objective when he entered politics.
“I didn’t enter the Knesset to open the communications market to competition. I mostly came with a social, socio-economic flag,” he said. “All my actions, also now, my insistence on being in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, are to block legislation that harms the weak, to ensure the guard of balance. That is my place.”
Initially, he aspired to become minister of economy in order to tackle the high cost of living and promote a free market economy, but Netanyahu asked him to take on the communications portfolio, telling him it “would be no less important.”
“I was involved in communications fields before,” Karhi said. “I spoke about opening the market to competition, about true freedom of expression… about how the government should not control content, to remove all the heavy regulation that prevents new bodies from entering the market. That was basically the foundation I had in the communications field.”
From the start, he said, he “realized the (communications) market really, really needs reform… For decades, they have been talking about reform because today, 80 percent of the market is already not under any regulation.”
Public funding
The controversy surrounding his proposed legislation has intensified in recent weeks, particularly after the government voted to shut down the 75-year-old state-funded Army Radio. Addressing the closure of the station and public broadcasting more broadly, Karhi said the state should not be funding services that the commercial sector can provide.
“The state intervenes where it needs to intervene,” he said. “There is already enough news content, Internet sites, newspapers, and a wide variety of communication channels, so the state does not need to fund news with hundreds of millions [of shekels] per year.”
“[US President Donald] Trump did this wisely,” Karhi emphasized, referring to the president’s moves to defund the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Responding to the age-old debate that commercial television leads to cheap, populist programming, while public funding enables high-quality content, Karhi said he agreed. He said that limited funding for certain quality programming should continue, but news or current affairs shows must be independent.
“All the other things, [such as] heritage, culture, news in foreign languages, in Arabic, Amharic, Russian, history, educational, original productions, Israeli creativity – all of that, in my view, can remain and even grow,” he said. “I want to let the private market do its thing.
Breaking monopolies
Karhi pointed out that criticism of public broadcasting funding comes from both sides of the political spectrum.
“The right wing and the left wing publics both question why the state should be ‘funding propaganda’ by endorsing news coverage,” he said. “Where content is controversial, the public should not fund it; that should not be done through public money.”
Asked about the fierce criticism from journalists of his reforms, Karhi said most of it stemmed from fears about competition.
“Today, there is a monopoly in Israel’s private [media] market, which is mainly Channel 12. It is the one leading the fight against this reform because they are very afraid of competition,” he said about Israel’s highest-rated news channel.
“When Channel 14 arose, it took a very large market share from them. Then Channel 15 and i24 News emerged, and they took more market share. They do not want more to arise… When there is a monopoly, you must fix market failure through different kinds of governmental intervention to regulate it,” Karhi said.
He also said that claims he was fast-tracking the legislation because it would be beneficial politically, especially during an election year, were wrong.
“You can’t say that, because I published this memorandum of the bill in July 2023, which was half a year after I entered the role. This is a process that’s been rolling for three years,” Karhi explained. “We go through three years of legal counseling, drafts from the Justice Ministry, Justice Ministry records, and internal processes of the Justice Ministry. The jurists control the process… That also needs to be fixed.”
“The essence of the law is that it’s not political,” he continued. “It’s meant to disconnect government involvement from media content.”
And, Karhi said his belief in this reform is so strong that even if the political pendulum swings away from his own ideological beliefs, he would still “absolutely” stand behind his changes.
“Once the market is out of content regulation, with officials and appointees deciding what can and cannot be said, it will also be hard for the Left, if it gets the opportunity, to change [it back],” he said.
Karhi asserted that he was determined to see his reforms passed ahead of an election, which must take place by the end of October 2025.
“This is a very complex law. There’s never been such a large reform in the communications market,” he said. “We’ll finish this legislative process.”■