Israel’s media: free but imperfect

Between the Netanyahu government’s anti-democratic moves and the pressures of a country at war, Israel’s independent media is more important than ever.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a free media.

A map produced by the US-based rights monitor Freedom House in 2023 shows Israel as the sole “free” patch, with a mass of “not free” and a few “partially free” countries surrounding it.

Both Gaza – ruled by Hamas – and the West Bank, Israeli occupied territory partially governed by the Palestinian Authority, are categorised as “not free”.

Four Middle Eastern countries are categorised as “partially free”: Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait. The rest – Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE – are “not free”.

Media is a key part of the assessment of democratic freedoms, together with electoral freedom, judicial independence, level of corruption and civil rights.

“The Israeli media sector is vibrant and free to criticize government policy,” reports Freedom House.

But it notes several caveats: military censorship, the influence of commercial interests and, increasingly, political interference under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Despite the existence of robust legal protections for journalists, Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister negatively affected the public’s trust in the media, which Netanyahu and his allies portrayed as traitors seeking to unseat him.