In advance of the Israeli election, Thomas Friedman has a column up attacking Sheldon Adelson. One of Mr. Friedman's complaints is that Mr. Adelson invests in newspapers. From the column:
Israel has much stricter laws on individuals donating to political campaigns, so Adelson got around that in 2007 by founding a free, giveaway newspaper in Israel — Israel Hayom — whose sole purpose is to back Netanyahu, attack his enemies in politics and the media, and enforce a far-right political agenda to prevent any Israeli territorial compromise on the West Bank (which, in time, could undermine Israel as a Jewish democracy). Graphically attractive, Israel Hayom is now the biggest-circulation daily in Israel. Precisely because it is free, it is putting a heavy strain on competitors, like Yediot and Haaretz, which both charge and are not pro-Netanyahu.
Adelson then bought the most important newspaper of the religious-nationalist right in Israel, Makor Rishon, long considered the main backer of Netanyahu's biggest right-wing rival, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. Last March, in an interview with Israel Army Radio after the Makor Rishon sale, Bennett said: "It saddens me. Israel Hayom is not a newspaper. It is Pravda. It's the mouthpiece of one person, the prime minister. At every junction point, every point of friction between the national interest and the interest of the prime minister, they chose the side of the prime minister."
The Washington Post said that last November at a conference of the Israel American Council, a lobbying group Adelson has funded, he joked in a public discussion with another wealthy Israeli: "Why don't you and I go after The New York Times?" Told it was family owned, Adelson quipped, "There is only one way to fight it: money."
The passage about Mr. Adelson joking "with another wealthy Israeli" is a strange one because neither Mr. Adelson nor the person he was joking with, Haim Saban, is an Israeli. They are Americans. Haim Saban doesn't get named by Mr. Friedman because his $15 million or so in disclosed federal political contributions have gone overwhelmingly to Democrats.
What's more, it's hypocritical of an employee of the New York Times, a newspaper controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which uses it to promote all kinds of political and ideological agendas, both in the editorial columns and elsewhere, to fault Mr. Adelson for trying to do the same thing with his own newspapers in Israel. Does Mr. Friedman think that the Ochs-Sulzbergers are in it strictly as an economic business? If they were, they would have sold like the Graham, Bancroft, and Chandler families did at the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. As an economic business, the New York Times company is failing — the stock price has gone from about $70 a share in 1998 to the current price of in the $13 range, and the dividend is insignificant. The reason Mr. Adelson can joke about buying it is that the New York Times company (Market capitalization, $2.3 billion) is worth a lot less than he is (Net worth, according to Forbes, $27.6 billion).
Mr. Friedman also doesn't mention that Haaretz, the competitor to Mr. Adelson's Israeli newspapers, is a business partner of the International New York Times.