Citizen Dankner - Haaretz

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Last update - 20:03 23/09/2007

Citizen Dankner

By Gidi Weitz and Esti Ahronovitz

Amnon Dankner got up from his black armchair. He rose to his full height, slipped his right heel partially out of its shoe and called out: "Stand up." Next to the door of his office stood Aviv Evron, a senior editor at the mass-circulation daily Maariv, who understood that he was to play "goalkeeper," and protect the door-goal. Dankner thrust his right foot backward and hurled the shoe at Evron. The "goalkeeper" had no choice but to try to catch the shoe before it hit him.

Evron went along with it. He wasn't the only one. Other employees had to go through the same ritual time and again. Dankner never played the goalkeeper, always the forward. "It was humiliating. Aviv is a cold, cynical guy, and I could see that he didn't like the game," a former senior editor at Maariv relates. "Those were bad scenes, and he wasn't the only one who experienced them."

The shoe game took other forms as well. In the office of Dankner's secretaries was a large wastebasket, and the editor in chief - ever the theatrical extrovert who basked in the presence of an audience, the boss who never missed an opportunity to show his staff how easy it is to get Ehud Olmert on the phone - tried to plunk his shoe into the wastebasket. "What was humiliating was that I, and others, had to stand there admiringly and applaud the performance, instead of telling him, 'What are you, nuts?'" says an editor at Maariv.

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Soon the era of the flying shoes will end. The favorite question, "Why aren't you as smart as me?" will no longer resonate in the corridors. After six years as editor of Maariv, Dankner has announced that he will step down at the end of the year. When the resignation announcement was made, six weeks ago, the staff of the paper's weekend magazine was holding an editorial meeting. One of the editors received a phone message to look at the Ace Web site, where he found the report of Dankner's resignation. A spontaneous roar of joy erupted in the room. Someone took out a camera and photographed the ecstatic group. "People paced the corridors saying, 'Did you hear? At last! At last!'" a reporter recalls. At lunch that day, members of the editorial board toasted the occasion with wine.

Not everyone, of course, was delighted with the news. Jerusalem-born Dankner, 63, is a complex, multifaceted journalist who will leave behind dozens of scarred employees at Maariv, but also a small group of fans. Neither camp was surprised by his resignation. For years they heard Dankner promise that he was going to return the keys to Ofer Nimrodi, the publisher, and go back to writing books, but in the past few months he seems to have become completely fed up. This is not the frenetic Dankner with the spark in his eyes, who took over as chief editor in 2002. The lust for victory has left him, the spirit of battle is gone.

On the eve of his appointment, Dankner was considered the strongman at the paper. He had the ear of the Nimrodi family, went devotedly to all the court sessions involving them, mustered all his writing skills in the total defense of Ofer Nimrodi and his father, Jackob, and mounted a vitriolic attack on the law-enforcement agencies in the 1998-'99 wiretapping scandal involving Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv. Dankner's status on the paper at the time is apparent from the transcript of the police wiretap of Jackob Nimrodi (who was later convicted of obstruction of justice in connection with his son's trial): The elder Nimrodi is heard telling the paper's editor at the time, Yaakov Erez, to make available "the most important and biggest space in the paper" for a Dankner article. Erez objected, noting that there had been terrorist attacks that day. Nimrodi replied, "I don't give two hoots about the terrorist attacks - The whole country can burn for him [Ofer Nimrodi]."

In addition to defending the Nimrodis, Dankner, a lawyer by education, had earlier assailed panels on three judicial levels for finding that Aryeh Deri, a former interior minister, had taken huge bribes. Not content to write militant articles, Dankner also spoke at the "protest yeshiva" that was established outside the prison where Deri served time and participated in the discussions held by Deri's lawyers and confidants, to work out the media strategy ahead of his request for an additional hearing by the Supreme Court. Although both Deri and Nimrodi were powerful figures, Dankner saw himself as playing Emile Zola to their Dreyfus.

Perhaps his defense of the two Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African descent) was an act of contrition by Dankner, who in 1983, following the murder of peace activist Emil Grunzweig, published the anti-Mizrahi article headlined "I don't have a sister" in Haaretz. Now, Dankner told his friends, people kissed him on the street in Jerusalem, blessed him and asked for his autograph.

Dankner's appointment as editor of Maariv struck many in the industry as a brilliant move. The belief was that his astuteness and leadership would compensate for his lack of editing and managerial experience. The concern, though, was that the acerbic, hedonistic Dankner would not be able to take the long hours, the dreary daily routine and the sheer hard work of editor in chief.

If you had asked me at every stage of my acquaintanceship with Dankner whether he wanted to be the editor of a page, a weekend magazine or a newspaper, I would have looked at you as though you were off your rocker," says Ron Maiberg, a former partner and friend. "Dankner, colleague and friend, preferred to write and in his spare time to lounge on the sofa in his underwear, read, watch television and play with his late dog. He is not lazy, but if a text could be postponed until the very edge of the deadline or thereafter - he's the man. I remember editors, myself included, virtually weeping in despair."

At the outset Dankner was given great latitude. The paper was then also financially sound. His plan was to make Maariv a higher quality paper and, above all, a more successful one. He radiated optimism. "That can be changed," he said confidently about the circulation lead of Yedioth Ahronoth, the country's biggest paper and arch-rival of Maariv. From this point of view, Dankner failed abjectly. Since he took over as editor, the circulation disparity between the two papers has grown in Yedioth's favor, though it, too, has lost readers. According to TGI, which surveys the local media, between the first half of 2001, before Dankner took over, and the second half of 2006, Maariv's "exposure" to newspaper readers plummeted by 20 percent. Even taking into account the general decline in newspaper readership, that is a serious debacle.

The reasons for the lack of success in catching up with Yedioth Ahronoth are not in my sphere, not in the editorial sphere," Dankner recently told the financial daily Globes. He pinned the blame for the circulation decline and the huge losses (tens of millions of shekels a year) on Nimrodi. In other words, it is not the product that is to blame, but the management, the marketing, the spirit of the time and so forth. But a close perusal of Dankner's tenure shows that Maariv was a saliently Danknerian product, a paper that had his imprint on every page. He will find it hard to evade responsibility for the paper's current nadir. Maariv's failure during his watch was not just commercial.

Given broad leeway by Ofer Nimrodi to reinvent Maariv, Dankner set to work. He made constant content and format changes, fired veteran reporters and editors in favor of young journalists - and then changed his mind about them, too. "When he got to be editor he simply went wild, like a poor kid who sees a branch of Toys 'R Us," says Gal Ochovsky, who worked at Maariv for 10 years, accompanied Dankner closely during his first months as chief editor, was considered one of his close advisers, and in the end was fired by him. "When I say 'kid,' I am letting him off easy. The truth is that sometimes you really did feel like giving him a break, because there is something infantile in him that he apparently cannot control. He is not really cut out to be a manager. He doesn't have a managerial bone in him. And at least in the period when I was at Maariv, the feeling was that he was competing with the writers and editors instead of taking pride in them.

If you examine what he did, all in all," Ochovsky continues, "you come up with a demonic figure, the most frightening type of Shakespearean character. It's a good thing he managed a newspaper and not a country. He has traits of famous dictators - without drawing comparisons, heaven forbid - by which I mean mainly a disconnect between what he thinks and what he does. He sometimes lacks true understanding of the consequences of his actions, and his type of personality allows him to do truly awful things. Yes, he is a very interesting personality, with an inner world and knowledge. He is really a someone you could write a fascinating play about. He is rife with contradictions. For example, he falls in love with Deri, whereas deep inside he is a bit of a racist. He falls in love with me, but deep within he is a bit of a homophobe. He is a leftist who hates leftists. All at the same time, bubbling like bad cholent."

What kind of Maariv is he leaving behind?

Ochovsky: "He destroyed the paper. There is no argument about that."

Dozens of current and former Maariv employees agree that the professional damage that Dankner inflicted on the paper started with politics - with the connection between the paper and Ehud Olmert. Prime Minister Olmert and Dankner have been close friends for many years, members of a group that used to meet a few times a month and includes media figures Yosef "Tommy" Lapid (who was in politics for a time and became justice minister), Yitzhak Livni, and, until recently, Dan Margalit (who severed his ties with Olmert and recently left Maariv). "You are missing out by not having a friend like Olmert. He is such a warm guy!" was one of Dankner's mantras at Maariv.

Maariv staffers witnessed first-hand the influence of this friendship on the chief editor's judgment. In the spring of 2001, a few months before his appointment, Dankner asked reporter Arel Segal to join him in interviewing Olmert, who was then the mayor of Jerusalem. Most of the interview was devoted to a frontal assault by Olmert on two of the Nimrodi family's adversaries at the time, Edna Arbel, the state prosecutor (now a Supreme Court justice), and Mordechai Gilat, an investigative reporter with Yedioth. Surprisingly, though, the interview did not carry Dankner's byline. His role was solely that of supervisor. Segal shared with his colleagues at Maariv his discomfiture at that embarrassing development. (This week he declined to comment.)

When Olmert was made the cabinet minister in charge of the Israel Broadcasting Authority - Dankner was by now editor in chief - a Maariv reporter called him to ask briefly about his future goals. Olmert cut the conversation short and said he did not give interviews. A few hours later, the reporter received a call from Dankner, who dictated to him the replies to the questions he had wanted to ask Olmert a few hours earlier.

These episodes were portents of what went on at Maariv in the winter of 2006, when Olmert ran for prime minister. It began even before the official announcement. Two days after Ariel Sharon collapsed and was hospitalized, Dankner set the tone: "The conventional wisdom is that the members of Kadima have to rally around Olmert, accept his authority and avoid internal squabbling, so that this very young party will prove its viability even without Sharon at its head ... Olmert is the only one of Kadima's leaders with rich political and executive experience, and the ability to conduct international dialogue."

In that dramatic week, the paper's political supplement decided to put together a quick profile of the heir-apparent. The lightning mission was assigned to an economic correspondent, Ronit Morgenstern, and the correspondent and editor Yaron Frost, now with Yedioth Ahronoth. The two worked around the clock and submitted the article the next day. A source on the Maariv editorial board recalls that Dankner asked to see the piece, which was e-mailed to him. "The article came back an hour later, and we discovered that all the negative passages about Olmert had been deleted. The supplement's editors argued about what to do, but decided that they could not contravene the wishes of the editor in chief."

A few weeks later, the military correspondent, Amir Rappaport, labored over an article for the political supplement about Olmert's limited experience in security affairs. The ritual repeated itself. "Dankner went over the piece and simply tore it apart in his handwriting," a source on the paper says. "Some of it needed correcting, but the article was turned upside down: What started out as a critical piece about Olmert ended up positive."

The major drama occurred a few weeks before the elections, when Maariv initiated a comprehensive profile of Olmert. The first to be assigned the job was a promising writer on the weekend magazine staff, Omri Assenheim. He worked hard, collected a great deal of archival material, and began a lengthy series of interviews. When a reporter on the paper saw him hunched over the archive pieces in the evenings, she warned him, "Do you really think you will be able to publish a serious critical piece on Olmert? Do you think Dankner will let you?"

Assenheim ignored this, until one day Dankner asked him - as attacks on Olmert from the Likud multiplied - to do a quick piece for the magazine about Olmert's military service. Assenheim collected critical descriptions about his army service, particularly an unflattering article that was published in the 1970s in the (now-defunct) muckraking magazine Ha'olam Hazeh. The upshot was that Assenheim's article was rewritten by the chief editor, who also added text of his own, and it appeared without most of the critical parts.

That was enough for Assenheim: He met with Dankner and informed him that he was dropping the profile project. Unconvinced, Dankner summoned Assenheim to a second meeting in his office, this time in the presence of senior staff members, including Ben Caspit, the diplomatic correspondent. Some of them told Assenheim that there was no need to take a "black-and-white" view of things and that he had to understand that the future connections with the Prime Minister's Office were crucial for the paper. But Assenheim stuck to his guns and was replaced on the project by Meirav Batito, who had come to Maariv a few months earlier.

Batito read the hefty archive files on Olmert and interviewed many people. One of the interviewees was Yosef Cohen, a former editor of Kol Ha'ir, under whom the Jerusalem-based weekly had run dozens of articles about Olmert. Cohen told Batito that in his view Dankner would delete every quotation that did not depict Olmert as a saint. And so it was: Not only Cohen's remarks were blue-penciled - so were other quotes of a critical nature. While she was working on the piece, Batito was seen entering Dankner's office many times for lengthy conversations. The editor wanted to help her analyze Olmert's fascinating personality. In addition, his office sent the editors of the weekly magazine a list of people for Batito to talk to. The list included Olmert's right-hand woman, Shula Zaken; Ruth Meir, the wife of a former Jerusalem deputy mayor; and Y.M., Olmert's commanding officer in an officers' course. They heaped praise on Olmert and their remarks were played up in the article. "It is hard for me to express in words [my feelings for] Ehud's behavior - he emerged in all his greatness," Meir said. "He was a cut above everyone," the army officer recalled. Dankner himself helped collect other favorable quotations.

In editorial meetings during the preparation of the article, the chief editor did not bother to hide his opinion about its subject. "He talked about Olmert and his wife, Aliza, with shining eyes," a senior figure at Maariv says. "Olmert's physical gestures were a total turn-on for him. [Dankner] spoke constantly about his warmth, about what a good friend he was, what a talented person." At one point, an editor of the weekly magazine was summoned to Dankner for a personal talk. He emerged taken aback: "Dankner asked me who I was going to vote for," he told friends. "I told him I hadn't yet decided, and he said sarcastically: 'Haven't yet decided? Then it looks like this article is not persuasive enough.'"

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