The publisher of Israel's second-largest newspaper, Ma'ariv, has been sentenced to eight months in jail for tapping the phones of reporters at Yediot Ahronot, the rival tabloid that consistently beats Ma'ariv in a bitter circulation battle, David Horovitz reports from Jerusalem.
Even though the jail term resulted from a plea bargain, Ofer Nimrodi and his lawyer immediately condemned it as unfairly harsh, apparently because Yediot's editor, convicted of similar offences, got off earlier this year with a suspended sentence.
The sentencing of Nimrodi marked the most dramatic stage in Israel's long-running "media war", a bitter struggle for daily newspaper sales. Yediot has long cherished the right to promote itself as "the country's newspaper", holding about two-thirds of the daily market. Ma'ariv, formerly owned by the late Robert Maxwell, has tried for decades to close the gap.
The tapping scandal arose out of that no-holdsbarred competition. Desperate to know what stories were being finalised for the next day's paper, and paranoid about leaks, management at both dailies ordered the tapping of their own and rival reporters' phones and other offices. So successful were the wiretaps that, at the height of the operation, the two newspapers consistently hit the news-stands with almost identical headlines and reports.
The case has underlined the dangers of limited media ownership. At the start of the 1990s Israel had six mainstream Hebrew-language dailies. Today there are only three, each of which is primarily controlled by a single family. Nimrodi, who broke down in tears at one stage of the court proceedings, is under pressure to resign. Yediot's editor, Moshe Vardi, did step down after his conviction in January.