Haaretz published a panegyric to Mayor Ron Huldai's Tel Aviv last week. It began as the lead story on the front page, and continued generously on the inside pages, including even visual "before and after" demonstrations, in a technique faithfully copied from the municipality's pamphlets.

This journalistic project presented in my view a partial and superficial picture, ignored controversial aspects of Huldai's work, and stuck to a very particular narrative: Tel Aviv was for decades a crumbling city that was about to collapse until Huldai arrived and saved it. This project was not to my liking, and that's all right - conflicting opinions in a newspaper are part of its uniqueness. What is less proper in my view is the lack of transparency for the readers.

Haaretz's readers were not given very important inside information: Ron Huldai and his entourage visited the newspaper's offices several weeks before the story ran and met with dozens of Haaretz editors and reporters. The meeting had been defined as a free-ranging background conversation, and it was agreed that everything said would be off the record. Nevertheless, Huldai showed up armed not only with the municipality's director general, but with a public relations woman, a spokesman and two assistant spokeswomen.