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Killing the Competition
David B. Green
 `HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?': Ma'arive owner Ofer Nimrodi (left) learned about the importance of victory from his father, Ya'akov. |
When Ofer Nimrodi was a 7th grader, he participated in the Bible quiz held annually by Teheran�s community of Israelis. To prepare him, his father, Ya�akov, the military attach� to the shah�s regime (who in a later incarnation as arms dealer achieved some notoriety for his role in the Iran-Contra affair), spent six months going over the Bible in its entirety with him. It paid off: Ofer came in a very respectable second. As Amira Segev described the scene a decade ago in a profile of Nimrodi in the newspaper Hadashot: "He ran, brimming with pride, to his father, who was seated in the first row, but his father grabbed him and whispered in his ear: �How could you do this to me?�"
Segev continued: "Ofer broke out in a torrent of tears and continued crying all night in the arms of his father, who wanted to bite his tongue [for what he had said]. But Ofer had learned the lesson: For him, only Number One would do."
Today, it seems reasonable to ask whether Ofer Nimrodi may not have learned his lesson a bit too well: Little more than a half year after his release from jail for illegal wiretapping and related offenses, committed as editor-in-chief and publisher of the newspaper Ma�ariv, he stands again in the spotlight, reportedly under investigation on suspicion of plotting to kill three men, two of them the publishers of Ma�ariv�s principal competitors.
The latest Nimrodi affair has captured the imagination of the Israeli public in a way that few stories can. But even if all the suspicions that have been raised against the 43-year-old former wunderkind of the Israeli business world turn out to be unwarranted, the affair raises a number of troubling questions about the state of the fourth estate in the country.
First a brief recap. The current case is really a continuation of the wiretap affair that sent Nimrodi, a one-time Supreme Court law clerk and a graduate of Harvard Business School, to jail for four and a half months. It emerged out of the bitter competition between Ma�ariv, which the Nimrodis� Israel Land Development Corporation bought in 1992, and Yediot Aharonot which, with a circulation of over half a million, commands some 65 percent of the market. In 1993, as both tabloids began to bear an uncanny resemblance to one another in content and not just form, they began employing private investigators to tap one another�s phones and faxes. In the case of Ma�ariv, their own employees� phones were bugged too - industrial spying was being used to check industrial spying. Bizarrely, and unknowingly, both papers used the services of the same PI, Rafi Pridan.
When the taps were uncovered, suspicion was cast on both Nimrodi and Yediot publisher and editor-in-chief Arnon Mozes, whose family owns the communications conglomerate whose flagship is the paper. No charges were ever brought against Mozes, but Yediot�s editor, Moshe Vardi, was convicted of wiretapping, a verdict later overturned in a higher court. Nimrodi, who did what he could to foil the investigation of himself, was eventually nailed only because Pridan�s partner, Ya�akov Tzur, agreed to turn state�s evidence against him. Mid-trial, Nimrodi signed a plea bargain with prosecutors and had charges that included tampering with an investigation reduced to just that of wiretapping. His sentence: Eight months in jail (which was reduced by a third for good behavior) and a million-shekel fine.
Earlier this fall, Pridan began serving a four-year jail term. During the summer, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to avoid jail, he began to offer prosecutors information about Nimrodi, who he said had plotted to kill Tzur in 1996 (either for revenge or to keep him from testifying) and had expressed a desire to do the same to Mozes and Ha�aretz publisher Amos Schocken. As they began to investigate, police got a court injunction preventing publication of any material relating to Pridan�s charges; after the story began to leak out, the injunction was lifted. Police confirmed the suspicions, but Nimrodi was not arrested and by late October had not even been questioned. One serving and two former police officers, though, were arrested on suspicion of interfering with both the current and prior Nimrodi investigations.
Nimrodi, who said he was "shocked" by the charges, denied everything, but suspended himself from his positions as editor-in-chief and publisher of Ma�ariv and managing director of ILDC. He explained away Pridan�s accusations as resulting from his own refusal to give in to the former PI�s attempts to blackmail him. In a freakish sideshow attraction, one TV media-analysis show aired a police tape made during a 1995 interrogation of Nimrodi, in which the suspect, not aware he was on camera, is seen, during a break in questioning, ripping a piece from a sheet of paper from a file on the interrogator�s desk, stuffing it in his mouth, and chasing it down with water.
Though initially journalists and jurists fretted over what they saw as an over-readiness of the courts to accede to requests from police to put gag orders on sensitive cases, calling it a threat to a free press, once the injunction was lifted and details emerged about the suspicions in this case, other concerns came to the fore. For one, the thought that Nimrodi may have had a direct tap into the police, a two-way channel that both provided him with sensitive information and also helped him influence or threaten witnesses is chilling, and apparently unprecedented in Israel.
The reemergence of the case is also a reminder that not only did Nimrodi�s plea bargain leave a lot of legal loose ends hanging, but that the press fell down in its coverage first time round too. Today, there are only three Hebrew newspapers of any gravity - Ma�ariv, Yediot and the broadsheet Ha�aretz - and the families that own them also own pieces of commercial Channel 2, of cable TV, and a variety of other media and non-media properties. The papers have not always done a proper job reporting on the improprieties of their senior officials. Ma�ariv is generally criticized for barely reporting on Nimrodi�s first trial and the events that preceded it, whereas Yediot�s coverage of its rival�s troubles looked more like gloating than journalism. No less insidious than publishers or editors interfering with their reporters� work is the very real possibility of reporters, all of whom are on personal (rather than union) contracts and who have no protection from the law, censoring themselves.
One prominent investigative journalist who works for a property owned in part by Nimrodi told The Report candidly: "If important [incriminating] information about [Nimrodi] fell into my hands, of course I would report it, and I�m sure my bosses wouldn�t stop me. But I wouldn�t choose to initiate an investigative story related to him, and for two reasons. On the one hand, people would say I can�t be objective about the subject; on the other, I wouldn�t want to put to the test the pressure that might be applied to me from above."
Cross-ownership is no less of a problem. Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi calls it "a state of monopoly the like of which is unknown in any modern democracy." He calls the quality of relations between the Nimrodi, Mozes and Schocken empires "not competition, but rivalry, which makes for a very brutal array of shifting alliances that oscillate between extreme hostility and partnership."
What�s more, the typical consumer is seldom aware of the cross-ownership. Who thinks of asking, when reading a feature story about an upcoming TV show in one of the papers, whether the Channel 2 licensee broadcasting it (programming for the commercial station is produced by three separate consortiums, which air their shows on different nights) is the one that the paper owns an interest in?
Ironically, the remedy to the problem of Israel�s increasingly unfree press could lie in government legislation. A commission headed by Israel Press Council president Haim Tzadok last year recommended two major changes in the law. One would prohibit someone convicted of a serious crime from being either publisher or editor of a newspaper: In the case of a Nimrodi, he would turn the property over to a trustee and no longer be involved in operational decisions. The other proposal was to prohibit newspaper owners from holding shares in either TV Channel 2 or the cable networks. The same week that the Nimrodi story broke, Knesset Member Tamar Gozanski and several colleagues introduced legislation very similar to the Tzadok commission proposals.
For the time being, the Israeli public is dining out on the constantly replayed, humiliating image of Ofer Nimrodi - a creative and sophisticated businessman with an overdeveloped appetite for winning - stuffing himself with notes from a police interrogation. In the long run, though, if it is to remain a society with a press worth paying attention to, Israel will have to come to terms with the structural problems of a media market where, in the words of Yaron Ezrahi, "the head of each paper thinks that there are only one or two human beings who can affect whether he succeeds or fails." Because when that is the case, it becomes conceivable, if profit is the only yardstick and morals and law have fallen by the wayside, that the most efficient way to deal with the person who stands in one�s way is murder.
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