The People of the Tube

...But anything would be better than the current state-controlled system which insists that every Israeli at any given moment must have the same taste—or face the choice of TV-or-not-TV...

...It needs a second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth channel...

...Ya'acov...

...Ya'acov...

...each day (it's still being broadcast...

...Amazingly, Israel has had television for only a dozen years...

...In the early days of Israeli TV, freedom of expression was hardly the issue...

...The anchorman would start an item about Richard Nixon, and a picture of Indira Gandhi would appear on the screen...

...since Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem was being beamed in color via satellite all over the world, Israelis were also allowed to see the historic event in color...

...What they grumbled about over the years was seeing everything in black and white...

...Instead of relying on ad revenue, Israeli TV supports itself by collecting an annual "license fee" from TV owners...

...You may well reasonably ask why Israelis were snapping up TV sets when there were no TV broadcasts in the country...

...But he admitted to the Knesset that a counter-cownier-apparatus surely could be developed...

...They pointed to the whopping taxes and duties on imported sets—a small Japanese portable costs an Israeli well over $ 1,000—and the taxmen said the government needed the revenue...

...Other TV personnel called this gross political interference and even blacked out the nation's TV screens several times in protest...

...This is followed by two hours of Arabic broadcasting, which includes sports, news and culture...

...This caused a storm in the government...

...What was going on...

...The reason, of course, is that with a country only 50 miles wide at the hips, it's easy to pick up TV signals from neighboring countries...

...Teachers would resist this, of course, just as the introduction of the blackboard was resisted in America a century ago...

...and the national lotteries...

...But in fact the Communications Ministry recently came out "in principle" for the establishment of a second, independent TV channel...

...This led to some head-on collisions...

...Once they started working in Israel, technical breakdowns were common...

...If the government doesn't like its own news service, it should get out of show business altogether and let a hundred flowers bloom...

...But the government did give in to demands the following spring and permitted color coverage of the peace-treaty signing in Washington...

...Finally, the Sixth Channel should be the mouthpiece of the government— whichever government happens to be in power...

...The tight budget allowed mainly for panel discussions, and since Israelis love to talk, these often dragged on for three hours or more...

...Jerusalem residents regularly tuned in Jordan, which offered two channels...

...When the Begin government took office, it exercised its right to replace the head of the Broadcasting Authority, and it naturally put in a man who supported Mr...

...A Third Channel should be a full-time educational network...

...A typical day starts with a few hours of instructional TV...

...This means a talk show or two (politics or religion), news, some music or maybe a Hebrew version of "I've Got a Secret," and usually one American or British series per night ("Loveboat" and "Dallas" are all the rage right now, although you can tell how far behind the times we are by the fact that J.R...

...Nor is the idea original...

...While you're sweating out your reserve duty in Sinai, Moshe Dayan is back home romancing your wife...

...The idea is hardly radical...

...It would be the electronic equivalent of a government newspaper—except that in contrast to totalitarian regimes, it would exist in a free market in which viewers would have the right to choose between the government's views and those of others...

...Although I endorse multiple channels, I don't think they should broadcast every day...

...The Authority's seven-man board and its 31 -man plenum were also reconstituted in political proportion to the party representation in the Knesset...

...Thus for the first time religious families in Israel could have a full range of programming celebrating the joys of Judaism, instead of the scant amount of appropriate programming they now get for their TV license fees...

...What prompted this was the government's unhappiness with the state TV's news coverage...

...The entire Knesset, for example, took up the showing of "Hirbet Hiza," a dramatization of a short story by S. Izhar which alleged mistreatment of Arabs during the War of Independence...

...So back in the early 1960s Israelis in the Galilee were merrily watching TV from Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus...

...The Israeli government, however, grew increasingly uneasy about so many of its citizens tuning in enemy countries every night...

...But the programming in general remains rather meager...

...Within a few weeks, the firm sold 1,000 of the devices...

...countries like Holland have Christian TV stations, and the Saudis maintain Moslem purity on their broadcasts...

...Indeed, when it went shopping abroad for cameras in 1969, all it could find was color equipment...

...It didn't matter that all this programming was in Arabic (can you imagine "Bonanza" in Arabic...

...The situation is ironic because the single TV station is, after all, run by the state...

...It granted one TV franchise —to itself...

...and down south in Eilat, Israelis could choose between Egyptian or Saudi Arabian telecasts...

...Both as a journalist and as your typical TV fan, I've long resented the state's monopoly of the TV airwaves...

...If and when the Arabs of the West Bank ever achieve autonomy, will they be allowed to set up a Palestine Broadcasting Corporation on the heights of Ramallah...

...Schedules were a joke...

...The viewer then would at least have a basis for comparison...

...And it decided to enter show business...

...For these reasons, polls show that most Israelis have concluded that the best way to get fair coverage of news events is to have more than one TV news service...

...Knowing that so many Israelis were on their wavelength, Jordanian TV actually introduced a regular newscast in Hebrew at 7:30 p.m...

...Well, Israeli TV has much improved since its infant days, and news coverage really came of age during the Yom Kippur War...

...In practice, what is designed to be a smorgasbord is more of a beggar's banquet, and what is supposed to be patterned on the BBC is in fact more akin to the kind of TV one gets in the Eastern Bloc...

...the main Hebrew broadcast begins...

...And when the Broadcasting Authority was broadcasting, the programs weren't anything to get excited about...

...Ever since the Begin government came to power in 1977, members of the cabinet have had running battles with TV news reporters over a number of controversial issues...

...The government promised freedom of expression to the Authority's board—but the cabinet would appoint the chairman and determine his budget...

...Welcome to the wacky world of Jewish TV, which is unlike TV anywhere else in the world...

...And blank screens on Saturdays...

...Then, because of the shoestring budget, the crews frequently called wildcat strikes for higher pay, blacking out screens...

...Israel Television is an independent entity, but it's a monopoly strictly controlled by the State Broadcasting Authority The Authority permits no commercials—sort of...

...Many residents of the Australian Outback receive a large part of their educational services via a television—and Israel has a considerable Outback itself waiting to be educated...

...Most Israelis know more than one language—and besides, it was television, that was the point...

...Even in the recession year of 1965, some 20,000 Israelis bought TV sets, and by the economic boom of 1968, that figure had doubled...

...That's really the only way to deal with the persistent complaint that Israel TV news is biased against the government...

...But since it had been authorized by the government to transmit only in black and white, the TV Authority developed a filtering system to wash the color out of shows like "Hawaii 5-0" before they got to Israeli TV sets...

...Still, the Broadcasting Authority supplements its budget by selling time for "public service" announcements...

...As a picture of the Pentagon appeared on the screen, the anchorman would cheerily say, "Take it away, Ya'acov Levy...

...Some countries have TV only five or six days a week, and they get along very nicely, thank you...

...That, however, was only the color question...

...On this channel the government would have unfettered opportunity to present its views and its version of the news...

...By midnight you get a quick news summary, the prayer of the day, Hatikvah, and that's all, folks...

...The Energy Minister argued that color TV sets consume five times as much electricity as black-and-white sets do...

...Most still supplement their diet by tuning in on the neighboring Arab countries...

...Finally at 8 p.m...

...Livne said his technicians could develop a counter-device to wash out the color that the privately developed gadget was putting back in...

...the Communications Ministry promptly threatened to call in the Navy to board the ship and confiscate Abie's equipment...

...One wag observed that Israel was the only country where a blind man could be a TV critic...

...Such announcements, however, are clustered before the evening's entertainment begins, so Israelis don't mind...

...When the camera finally returned to the newscaster, all that could be seen was his Adam's apple...

...Government ministers have charged that TV news tends to accentuate the negative—for example, skyrocketing inflation, or Arab demonstrations in Judea and Samaria...

...propagandists...

...Old-line Orthodox Jews in the government meanwhile argued that TV would mean immoral entertainment, corruption of the youth and possible desecration of Shabbat...

...To offset Channel One, the Second Channel should be nothing but lowbrow junk, because everybody has a right to low-brow junk—and of course we could switch to the high-brow channel whenever somebody rings the doorbell, the equivalent of having impressive intellectual tomes out on the coffee table...

...To be fair, the Labor government used to get equally upset over anything controversial...

...Some have even charged that the news staff is in the grip of a "left-wing mafia" which takes every opportunity to make the Likud-led coalition look bad...

...Television crews were hastily trained abroad...

...got shot in the Jewish State only this spring...

...The government relented that November for one day...

...Currently this comes to about $70, and Israelis seem to prefer shelling out for the tax to having "Love Boat" interrupted by exhortations to shop at Super-Sol...

...Imagine their surprise, then, when they tuned in a typical black-and-white show from Israel one evening and suddenly got it in living color...

...that was to come up more recently...

...Finally, to the objection that six channels would spell a surfeit of mind-numbing video, I heartily agree...

...It's easy to blame TV newsmen for bad news that happens—such a confusion is common—but it's also true that the presence of TV cameras can inspire demonstrators to riot, and that not even a camera's lens is objective...

...Sure enough, an Israeli electronics firm soon announced the creation of a small device that could be attached to a TV set to bring back the bleached-out color...

...Take it away, Ya'acov...

...But the tax officials came out in favor of color TV...

...His article, "Explosion in the Anglo-Arts," appeared in the January-February 1982 MOMENT...

...But he didn't count on the ingenuity of the Israelis...

...And this spring Israeli TV introduced color broadcasts, which is to say it broadcast in color all along, but until now you just couldn't get anything except black and white...

...After much hue and cry, the program was eventually shown on Israel TV, but with the addition of a panel discussion afterwards in the hope of achieving balance...

...The one advantage Israeli TV has over its Arab rivals is its lack of commercials...

...But that didn't impress your average Israeli man-in-the-living room...

...So after much heated debate, the Israeli government bowed to the inevitable...

...Please...

...the Orthodox already have their own newspapers and political parties...

...Back in 1969, just getting on the air and staying on were the chief hurdles...

...Lapid, a former journalist himself and by most accounts a fair man, replied that he was merely doing his job and was determined to choose the best people for the positions under him...

...In addition, educational TV could offer perpetual ulpanim at various levels for the study of Hebrew and a full-range adult-education program coordinated with Everyman's University...

...Typical advertisers are the Citrus Marketing Board ("Eat more oranges...

...After school there's an hour or so of kiddie shows...

...Several foreigners, including Los Angeles investor Victor Carter, said they were eager to set up such a station to rescue Israelis from the boredom of skimpy state programming...

...Israelis continued to clamor for color...

...Livne promised it wouldn't happen again...

...And they both very well may have been right...

...Yitzhak Livne, then head of the Broadcasting Authority, explained sheepishly the next day that Israel had had color equipment all along...

...A year later, however, then Deputy Premier Yigael Yadin vetoed a colorcast from Oslo of Premier Begin getting his Nobel Peace Prize...

...Veteran Israeli TV-watchers also recall with fondness the newscasts of those pioneering days...

...And frequently, the Arabs would slip in those crude attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Zionists with messages like: "Israeli soldier...

...I think four days a week would be plenty for the People of the Book...

...At the very least, this would provide much needed employment for the numerous native artists and performers who are turned out by Israeli academies every year and who must go abroad to find work...

...It was an electronic Mexican standoff...

...The First Channel should be a truly high-brow station offering drama, dance, classical music, documentaries and discussions...

...The Likud's new TV boss, Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, chose not to renew the contracts of some TV department heads...

...If so, Israel had better be prepared to counter this most powerful propaganda tool...

...After a minute or so of bobbing necktie knot, viewers would then be told that "we're switching over now to our man in London, Ya'acov Levy...

...In 1969, the quasi-independent State Broadcasting Authority, which managed the Voice of Israel radio, was expanded to include television...

...The entire Talmud could be taught over TV, kiddies could be parked in front of the set without their parents worrying about them being contaminated by apikoros entertainment, and the station would be shomer shabbat (the other stations, of course, would not be...

...The Arab newscasts, for example, were generally Lev Bearfield is a writer who lives in Jerusalem...

...Nevertheless, the TV news staff were all used to doing things a certain way when the Labor Party was in power, and they weren't about to adjust their point of view to suit the new Likud government...

...The reason for this delay in entering the 20th century was two-fold: Old-line socialists in the government resisted licensing a television station because they thought TV was a decadent bourgeois pastime, that it would result in workers dragging themselves to their factories each morning bleary-eyed from the previous night's electronic debauchery...

...If that sounds like anemic TV, well, the Israeli public agrees...

...Public pressure had been building simultaneously for a second channel run on an independent, commercial basis, such as exists in England alongside the BBC...

...A maximum of two movies per week are aired on Israel TV, because of pressure from the cinema-owners association...

...The Knesset promptly amended the law and got the cable rebels shut down...

...Israel has yet to adapt its classrooms to television (and its schools need every bit of help they can get...

...The drama, incidentally, was taped and re-broadcast by Jordanian TV, which only increased the suspicions among the right wing in the Knesset that Israel TV had a decidedly leftward tilt...

...The Fifth Channel should be a full-fledged Arabic station...

...Abie Nathan, whose Voice of Peace "pirate" radio station operates from a ship off the coast of Tel Aviv, said he was thinking of switching to TV broadcasts...

...This indeed was one of the very few times in Israel's history when the socialist and religious parties were in accord...

...And this brings up an interesting question...

...Because Jordan broadcasts in color, nearly 100,000 Israelis had purchased color receivers by 1977...

...Confusing...

...Israeli TV—with wild optimism—was to be modeled on Britain's BBC...

...Begin...

...Public pressure mounted for legalizing color transmissions once and for all...

...Like the Orthodox, Israeli Arabs are discriminated against by today's Israel Monovision, as Arabic programs are limited to off hours and Hebrew programs are only sporadically subtitled in Arabic...

...the rest of the time the TV screens should broadcast a single word: READ...

...By 1981 nearly half of Israeli households had color sets, and the government finally caved in: Full color transmission was authorized to begin in May 1982...

...Enterprising Israelis started cable TV service in the Tel Aviv region, claiming that subscription TV could exist outside the broadcasting law...

...But Israel doesn't need just a second channel...

...The other night, Livne explained, the filter had somehow failed momentarily and a bit of color had inadvertently entered Israeli lives...

...The Fourth Channel could be devoted solely to religious programming...

...with occasional undubbed French movies via Lebanon or British dramas from Jordan...

...The government meanwhile would get into a dither any time something controversial appeared on TV...

...A proper Arabic channel of its own would be Israel's proper reply...