Last update - 14:39 10/11/2005
State Comptroller's Report / Army Radio: budget bugaboos and tattered tapes
By Anat Balint
The archive at Army Radio contains approximately 70,000 hours of recordings, some of them of rare historical importance. But according to the State Comptroller's Report, a large portion of them are in danger of disintegration due to poor handling, unsuitable storage conditions and the fact that they are analog tapings that not have been transferred into a digital format.
In 2002 the cost of preserving the Army Radio archive was estimated at NIS 14 million. A request for budgeting was relayed to the head of the general army headquarters, but so far no approval has been granted for the project. Radio and archive workers say there are historical recordings on deteriorating tape, and note that some irreplaceable recordings have been lost. One worker told Haaretz how he began playing a recording of a performance of Shalom Hanoch from 1977 and watched the film disintegrate while it was being shown.
The main section of the State Comptroller's Report on Army Radio, however, deals with the handling of the station's budget, advertising deals and personnel management. Faults were found in all these areas, indicating the problematic status of the station, which belongs to the Israel Defense Forces, but whose nature, as a media body, is contrary to the military spirit. The IDF and the Defense Ministry, it seems, are avoiding formulating a policy or taking any decision that would settle the contradiction between the station's ownership and its character.
The comptroller's report notes that faulty management of the station's budget prevents any tracking of its various sources of income - whether from the army or from sponsorship agreements and public service broadcasts. Thus, for example, Galgalatz, the Army Radio music channel, has a barter agreement with Pelephone that does not appear in the budget. Other barter agreements worth millions of shekels annually are similarly absent from the budget. The services that Army Radio receives from other branches of the IDF are also not included in the budget, which is submitted for the approval of the chief education officer. At the end of this section of his report, the comptroller recommends turning Army Radio into a closed budget system that will sell radio services to the IDF and will purchase services from it.
A whole chapter of the report concerns the nature of the business relationships between Army Radio and its commercial sponsors, which are conducted without proper legal and economic examination. The comptroller writes that Army Radio's financial and marketing staff work without the appropriate training for their jobs.
An investigation into the income from the deal with Pelephone, for example, found that Army Radio does not benefit as it should have from the company's commercials: Pelephone provides the station with services worth NIS 2 million - an airplane that flies over the Dan Region every day, plus 110 cellular telephones for the station's workers. But the company, for its part, receives advertising estimated by the station's economic department to be worth between NIS 5.5 million and NIS 16.3 million. The comptroller feels that the discrepancy between these figures indicates the deal was done without accurate and verified data, and that Pelephone has received advertising whose value far exceeded the services it provided.
Advertising via the awarding of prizes is another area that is unregulated at Army Radio.
"It was found that station workers, including program producers, among them soldiers doing their compulsory service, conducted negotiations with commercial companies, entered relationships with them for the receipt of the prizes, and also signed agreements with them in this matter without proper authorization," states the report. "Covert competition has been created between the producers of the various programs as to who can obtain the `most valuable' prizes."
In two cases the comptroller found that in addition to the prizes for listeners, the advertising company wanted to send other perks, such as tickets to a show or T-shirts, to be distributed among the station's workers. Here, too, as in the case of the sponsorship agreements, it was found that Army Radio staff regularly granted the prize donors rates that were significantly lower than those set by the station in May 2002 (according to which each mention of a company's name is worth a prize that costs NIS 1,150).
"The character of Army Radio's unique activities in the framework of the army requires the formulation of an appropriate normative foundation," concluded the comptroller's report. This, he writes, means the IDF and the Defense Ministry should be much more involved in what goes on at the station, and that "over the years they have not worked toward the establishment of minimally appropriate [administrative] infrastructure for the station's operation."