Gideon Sa'ar on ending engagement with the Blue and White party/Elad Gutman
Rarely does a current affairs program manage to generate a headline outside of the mainstream edition.
This honor is usually reserved for flagship programs, such as Ilana Dayan's "Fact", the title of which emerges from an interview or an investigation in its field, becoming a trailer (even then, in the main edition) for its broadcast.
Sometimes this title is so surprising that even leading journalists and commentators such as Amit Segal and Ben Caspit do not notice it even when it falls into their hands like a ripe fruit, but only in retrospect.
It is possible that for all viewers this is a trivial matter, but if I were a media lecturer, for example, I would show the interview with Gideon Sa'ar conducted last night on "Meet the Press" repeatedly to my students, as an example of a headline that was missed in real time.
It is important to note that unlike a surprise attack in real time (for example), the damage of the doze in the guard did not turn out to be serious, as it was very quickly processed, translated and presented in the correct context to the viewers of the main edition of the channel (12), and still, it would have been better if the token had fallen live.
Since I hope for most of the readers they had something better to do in their free time, just before the pleasures of the weekend give way to the clouds of the new week bound in the Shabbat morning sky, we are required for the event itself: an interview with the interesting political personality of the past week, Gideon Sa'ar.
Let's start by saying that the medium is the message: the senior political personality of the events of the past week - and only (with all due respect, of course) "meet the press" at 19:30 on Motzash instead of at 20:30 at Yonit Levy's, say, on Thursday?
Teach us On the initially low level of interest that his surprising step aroused (the dissolution of the camp from my state - and sorry if I misstated the current name of the faction-party, but they started it).
Then we will move on to the interviewee - and try to use the understatement: not exactly a charisma bomb, or to use the language Less considerate: a boredom bomb that causes the scout to control the channels in languages they don't know - and only to be saved by the talking head that fills the screen with a ball of hot air, a balloon of self-importance whose origin no one knows.
In the photo: two sharp and experienced journalists who, in the sleepy atmosphere of Shabbat night, were unable to put one and another together/screenshot, Keshet 12
Like leaven in a hospital
As for Segal, they also thought that this was the end of the interest (or rather, the lack of interest) in their interview and asked him question after question as a learned people's commandment, which only made the militant fervor (within the limits of the genre) that was in Sa'ar's arsenal at the beginning of the interview even more laughable.
Then Sa'ar began to scatter the one and another and another - and so on - and neither of his two experienced sitters had the resourcefulness to connect all the dots to the picture.
Sa'ar was asked about the ideological differences between him and Benny Gantz.
Spoiler: There are none, just as there are none between Netanyahu and Gantz, the same applies to Eizenkot, Lapid and everything that we try to demarcate between the Labor Party, Meretz corner, and religious Zionism.
These are quite similar versions of Yamin Lite in the center.
Sa'ar only proved this point when he began listing the points of disagreement between Gantz and himself, for example Jewish settlement in northern Samaria (?!) or the absence from the vote regarding the removal of MK Ofer Kasif. Wow, indeed issues on which political frameworks are dismantled.
Then an amazing thing happened: Gideon Sa'ar's lips continued to move, but the voice that emanated from them was the voice of Idit Silman. I want to say, when such stupid reasons are presented to you, you must immediately recognize that it is "leaven in the hospitals" that is, excuses designed to obscure the real reason. Segal and Kaspith, who noticed the drawing from a mile away, but to their naivety believed that Sa'ar was trying to smear them in the name of a cover for a political agenda whose purpose is to wink at new right-wing voters who dislike Netanyahu, and let's not assume because of the understandings he reached with the Prime Minister.
That's why even when Sa'ar released the headline that if his demand is not met to join the war cabinet immediately, contrary to Gantz's veto, he will withdraw from it already this week, two of his interviewers did not come down to the end of the matter.
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Gideon Sa'ar and Benny Gantz, with the decision to join the Netanyahu government.
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Politics now
With your permission, we will move for a few paragraphs from television criticism to the political field: for the intelligent among the viewers, the picture has already begun to become clear - Netanyahu is doing everything to avoid close elections, but his coalition is wavering.
When his defense minister has already granted Gantz and Eisenkot veto rights over the emerging recruitment plan (which is nothing more than eye work in an attempt to buy more time), it is possible that additional "rebels" (the immediate suspects: Barkat, Edelstein and others) may, in Netanyahu's view, join him and connect with the sentiment of Likud voters who are fed up with the evasion of the ultra-orthodox (it is about industry - and not about studying Torah, as the main article in the Mozhai Shabbat edition proved).
Therefore he urgently needs new fingers.
Sa'ar's support will give him four more fresh fingers, not a bad whip - not only towards potential rebels in his party, but also towards the fringes of the extreme right in his government.
what did we get
A government that will spend its full days, even though there is no poll that does not express the Israeli voter's distaste for it.
Possession of faculty and finances that this calculation, which even a layman like me can do in front of the screen, they do even in their sleep.
What they didn't realize in real time is that it's a closed deal, even if it's not over (one lady, gifted with a rare sense of smell about potential cheaters, might trip him up and keep her husband's verbal promise to Saar).
Therefore, they focused on the time dimension ("in the next few days") and missed the essence.
Netanyahu will appear before the public, will say that Gantz chose division on personal grounds (instead of disbanding the government on seemingly ideological grounds, such as the issue of conscription), will imply that it prevented him from achieving the "total victory" that he constantly proclaims about him, will accept Sa'ar's demand - even if " will be punished" publicly, it will only be in polls.
In reality, he will face another three years of trying to convince the public and complete legal legislation (remember?) that Sa'ar will help him promote.
like a man?
Nir Davori's spewing mainly proved that traditional television on the whole produces punches for social networks/screenshot, News 12
Good name good from man-man
This politics is a matter for other columns.
In our case, what is important is that the two senior journalists may not have believed that one of the most boring people in Israeli politics had placed such a scoop at their door (even if implicitly), they missed the full picture in real time and thus completed a particularly unsuccessful weekend for current affairs broadcasts: on Twitter, for example, they "celebrated" at the expense of two journalists Others, Nir Debori (12) and Telali Shem Tov (13).
The first was speechless when he said that Brigadier General Goldfuss received the reprimand from the Chief of Staff "like a man."
The second compared the words of the same Goldfuss, according to the Sephardi chief rabbi ("we will leave the land").
Let's start with my bees: he used a phrase that is not appropriate for a major news release in 2024, but that's not only where the story begins, but also where it ends.
He was speechless, he said something that was better left unsaid - and all in all he meant that Goldfuss accepted his judgment with understanding and with his head held high.
True, in an age that seeks to promote brave warriors (an attitude that, as far as I understand, Dvori also shares) this betrays, seemingly, patterns of thought that have lost their nerve, but really nothing more than that.
The funny-sad thing is that some of those who rolled on Debori in relatively gentle language, such as someone who smilingly corrects "women" to a man-speaker who said "girls", lost this courtesy when they asked to be sent in a good name, who dared to score the almost uniform appearance of the television news commentators.
I'm not sure there was room to compare the words of the chief rabbi with those of the senior commander, but whoever listened to the name Tov throughout the 90 seconds in which she made her argument that both of them were expected to behave more stately, as required by their duties, would have found that they were not without point.
It's just that Shem Tov has already been marked as someone who reeks of bibism - and proved that bibism is worse than bibism: while the attacks on Dvori were relatively mild, Shem Tov received nicknames ranging from "clogged" to "broken", which are mainly reserved for women - and when she responds on Twitter, A minute before she had condemned Debori for the chauvinism implied (allegedly) in his words, calling a good name "broken", the irony in her honor and herself closing her Twitter account.
The monologue of Shem Tov
What else can be learned from these two who stirred up the network at the weekend?
that traditional television is almost no longer interesting in itself, but mainly deals with the production of anecdotes for the online platforms: if you said something between eight and nine, it will be forgotten in nine minutes.
If you said something that was echoed later on Twitter - then you won (for better or for worse) a shelf life of at least a few days.
We will not say goodbye to "Meet the Press" without looking at what the most interesting character on the channel said last night, Chen Lieberman, who concluded in despair: "We are back to something worse than October 6", just before she noted that with all due respect to the Spanish Chief Rabbi, whoever will leave the country They are not ultra-Orthodox youths haunted by the fear of conscription, but rather progressive secular youths, for whom an Israel that returns to legal legislation, nationalist extremism and religious coercion will not offer them any future.
This may not be a title, but this was the sentence I took with me from "Meet the Press" into another week - the next one for all of us.
More on the same topic:
Amit Segal
Ben Caspit
meet the press
Gideon Saar