Israeli News Channel i24 Takes Aim at CNN, the BBC—and Al Jazeera

The headquarters of i24news, Israel’s first
international news channel, is still
unfinished. Outside, the glass building in
Tel Aviv’s newly redeveloped Jaffa port
sparkles, but inside the cavernous blue-lit
newsroom, where broadcasts launched in
mid-July, wires and beams are still
exposed. But the ongoing construction
doesn’t seem to bother the 150 journalists
working around the clock to produce
simultaneous newscasts in English,
French, and Arabic.
It’s a mix that, by leaving out Hebrew,
immediately signals i24’s ambition to
speak to viewers beyond Israel’s borders.
While English and French were obvious
choices, the network’s founders say the
decision to broadcast in Arabic was taken
consciously to build an audience in parts
of the world most hostile to Israel.
“People will watch us because they hate
us, and they will watch us through
curiosity,” said Frank Melloul, the
network’s Swiss-born 39-year-old CEO,
who says he believes he can eventually
compete with CNN, the BBC, and Al
Jazeera for viewers. “They will see how
we cover the 70 percent of international
news, and if they can trust that, then they
will also trust how we cover Israeli news.”
The goal, Melloul says, is not so much to
promote Israel’s interests, but to shift the
media narrative by adding to the mix of
stories available on television. “I want to
change the story a bit,” Melloul said. Last
week, when 26 prisoners were sent back
to the West Bank and Gaza in the first
stage of that release, the i24 website
carried a detailed list of their exact names
and crimes, as well as the names of their
victims, many of whom were murdered
civilians. “When we are talking about an
incursion in Gaza, all channels start
broadcasting when the IDF is going into
Gaza,” Melloul said. “Nobody starts
broadcasting when Israel is under attack
and getting rockets. There is always a
fact before an invasion in Gaza.”
Melloul has played this game before, at
France24, where he was head of strategy
before moving to Israel to join i24 last
January. What sets i24 apart from its
competitors is that it isn’t a government
project: Licensed in Luxembourg and so
far lacking any commercial advertisers, it
is chiefly bankrolled by Patrick Drahi, the
media tycoon who also owns Israel’s
HOT network. The new channel is
privately held; its budget has been
reported in the French press to run about
50 million euros, about half of what
France24 cost annually and a mere drop
in the bucket compared to the $1 billion
launch budget for the Qatari-backed Al
Jazeera.
But i24 is clearly following the path
blazed by those broadcasters. “In some
ways the BBC was the original, and Al
Jazeera is the most prominent. But I look
at France24 and at Russia Today, at CCTV
in China and in America, and I think to
myself that maybe every big country is
going to have its own channel,” said
Brian Stelter, a media reporter for the
New York Times and author of Top of the
Morning. “I assume that the real unique
trait about this channel is the notion of
them balancing out Al Jazeera,” he
added. “But it makes a lot of sense for
this to happen because it seems like we’re
going to see a lot of countries doing this.”