Israel’s hard news and soft power; After helping set up France 24, Frank Melloul has launched a news channel in Israel

August 29, 2013 7:34 pm

Israel’s hard news and soft power

By John Reed

©Quique Kierszenbaum

Communicator: Frank Melloul says i24’s structure helps strengthen its independence

At i24’s glassy new studios above Israel’s trendy Jaffa port waterfront complex, Frank Melloul’s staff, whom he describes as a “Tower of Babel”, are working in full swing. As midday approaches, editors are chattering in English, French and Hebrew as they draft scripts, edit programmes or prepare for studio interviews. A neatly coiffed female presenter is reading the news in French at a desk behind a glass wall. The 24-hour news channel, Israel’s first, began broadcasting on July 17 with a mission to present international news – which makes up about three-quarters of its output – from an Israeli perspective.“I think it’s about time to listen to another voice from the Middle East other than Al Jazeera – especially from a democracy,” says Mr Melloul, a slight, intense former diplomat for France and news executive, who immigrated to Israel last year and set up the station in double time.

The target, he says, is “people who don’t know Israel at all – people who have too much caricature about Israel who always talk about this country through the [prism of the] Arab-Israeli conflict”.

Israel has the Middle East’s most innovative corporate sector, a feared and formidable army, and a culture of vivid political and journalistic debate. It is, however, a failure at using soft power to win hearts and minds in the wider world. A recent BBC poll covering 16 countries and the EU ranked Israel as one of the world’s most poorly regarded nations, ahead of only North Korea, Pakistan and Iran.

The new station’s ambition is to help shift these perceptions by showing a side of Israel the outside world seldom sees: a diverse society where difficult issues are taken seriously and unpopular views are given proper debate.

Regional airwave traffic

The Middle East’s 24-hour television news market is highly competitive. While it is dominated by Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Saudi-backed Al Arabiya, broadcasters from Britain, France, the US, Iran, Russia and China have all launched Arabic-language channels in attempts to build regional influence. Last yearSky News Arabia was launched, while Saudi Arabia’s Prince Waleed bin Talal, a significant investor in BSkyB’s controlling shareholder, News Corp, is preparing to launch a news channel of his own, in partnership with Bloomberg News, to be called Alarab.

Unlike other national news channels such as France 24 – which Mr Melloul helped to set up – i24 is privately funded. It does not broadcast in Hebrew and, Mr Melloul claims: “We are not doing propaganda.”

He says: “It is to show that Israeli society is more complex than you think and to use the diversity of Israeli society to explain that Israel has lots of points of view, not only one.”

So when Israel’s government recently began releasing the first of 104 Palestinian prisoners to help promote a renewal of peace talks, i24 organised a debate that included the father of one of the prisoners’ victims and the mother of another.

The debate asked the question: “Do you think Israel is right to release people who killed your children for peace?” Reflecting an emotional debate that the prisoner release opened in Israeli society, the father came down in favour of the release, arguing the sacrifice was worth it, while the mother was against.

Round-the-clock news channels have proliferated over the years, with the likes of Russia’s RT international, Britain’s BBC World News, Germany’s DW-TV, Japan’s NHK World and China’s CNC World – to say nothing of the saturated Arabic news market (see box).

But even with crowded airwaves, some observers say the new channel meets a real need for Israeli soft power: “This is something Israel has struggled with for a long time: how to affect media and public opinion around the world,” says Lior Averbach, media correspondent for Globes, the Israeli business publication. “We always felt that in Israel we were losing that war.”

Suitably for a country that styles itself as “Start-Up Nation”, i24 made it from business plan to 24-hour broadcasting in less than a year. Mr Melloul was approached with the idea for the channel last October by Patrick Drahi, a French-Israeli businessman who owns cable companies in several countries, including Israel’s popular Hot network.

Mr Melloul was an obvious choice to launch the new channel. The 40-year-old had been advising Dominique de Villepin, France’s then prime minister, on communication when he was asked to devise a strategy for an international news channel, which was to become France 24. After differing with the US over the invasion of Iraq, France wanted a channel to explain its policies to the world.

Israeli businessmen, media impresarios and philanthropists had attempted several times before to build a viable Israeli news channel. With a donation of undisclosed size from Mr Drahi, i24 managed to do this. “I think we did a record here: to launch three international news channels in three months,” says Mr Melloul. The network broadcasts in English, French and Arabic.

The station has been lucky in the timing of its launch – barely a week before Egypt’s coup d’état and suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Middle East’s biggest news stories this year. As well as i24’s 230 employees, about 150 of whom are journalists, the network keeps 25 correspondents on call in north Africa, the Gulf, the West Bank capital of Ramallah and the Gaza Strip.

Early reactions to the channel have been positive, both in Israel and elsewhere. Syrian state television, of all outlets, published a surprisingly neutral report recently on i24, spinning news of its launch as a sign of “failure” by Al Jazeera, which Bashar al-Assad’s regime loathes because it sees its reporting as siding with the rebels seeking to topple it.

Other Arab media, including Al Jazeera itself, have also toured the Jaffa studios to cover the launch.

Mr Melloul built a studio reminiscent of France 24’s – an open-plan area whose three studios stand behind glass walls visible to editors sitting on the production floor. Editors for the different language editions of the same programme – the evening edition, for example – sit at the same desk. Mr Melloul says he kept staffing tight to encourage co-operation. “They have to because we are not enough people,” he says. “It’s part of my strategy – to make them do synergies.”

Under the same lean ethos, the channel has eschewed full-fledged news bureaux in favour of correspondents. “If you are a news channel you need to be reactive,” he says. “Sometimes when you have a bureau it’s too much bureaucracy, too much organisation.”

The channel is registered in Luxembourg, where its shareholders incorporated the company, meaning that i24 is not, legally speaking, an Israeli entity. Mr Melloul claims this helps to strengthen its independence, compared with other 24-hour news channels that are backed by state broadcasters.

The new channel has struggled with some of the same vicissitudes as other media in the region. Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, recently closed i24’s office there, along with those of the Palestinian Ma’an news agency and Al Arabiya, the Saudi-backed pan-Arab TV station, although i24 is still taking calls from its correspondent via phone.

The question now is whether viewers will come, bringing with them enough advertiser interest to sustain the network. The company’s business plan has it breaking even in year four.

The channel is available on satellites in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, reaching “potentially more than 810m households”, Mr Melloul says grandly. It is talking to cable providers in Europe, including Britain’s BSkyB, for a place in their offering.

The network, ironically, is not yet available on its owner’s Hot service because its application is still wending its way through Israeli bureaucracy.

This, says Mr Melloul, should be a fitting riposte to anyone who says i24 is serving up Israeli state propaganda. “If I were a government agent, wouldn’t I have got all my papers by now?”