Citizen Dankner - part II - Haaretz

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Last update - 19:59 23/09/2007

Citizen Dankner - part II

By Gidi Weitz and Esti Ahronovitz

With Dankner's agreement, Batito prepared a chart of about 20 unpleasant affairs from Olmert's past, including police investigations against him and other episodes. The chart was not published. Olmert's run-ins with the law were barely mentioned. Dankner, who copy-edited the article himself, wrapped it in the familiar style and added passages of his own. The huge piece, which ran as a two-part feature, portrayed Olmert as a superstar: a mature and brilliant statesman and politician with a wealth of experience. The Olmerts' personal life was not omitted, either: "They went through the hard years with that lack of awareness of young people which years later leads them to look back in astonishment: How did we manage? It's easy to assume that they managed because of the strength of their love and their sheer delight in each other. They complemented each other: He is vibrant, tempestuous, speaks with broad motions, is warm, embracing, loves to laugh, has ambitions and has many dreams for a sparkling future. She is quiet, speaks slowly and thinks before she speaks, is gentle and modest but has a strong, independent character."

The reaction to the article at Maariv was deep professional embarrassment. "It was a serious mistake on his part," says a reporter on the paper who emphasizes that he likes Dankner, "and in my opinion he still regrets it." When the second part of the article appeared, Batito came to the paper's editorial offices, glanced at the article and pushed the magazine away. "I don't want to read it ever again," she told a friend. "It is a brutal journalistic rape." Batito continued to use the harsh metaphor, but never discussed the subject with Dankner again. "It's like a dark secret in the family that you don't talk about," she told friends. This week she said, "I drew the conclusions from that case."

In the Second Lebanon War the Olmert agenda became the paper's agenda. Even before the war, it was apparent that Olmert was moving Maariv rightward: From headlines such as "With a strong hand and an outstretched arm" during Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, to the embrace of the settlers during the Gaza disengagement, Dankner's paper became more Zionist and more nationalist. The war in Lebanon radicalized positions. Maariv staffers took to calling the chief editor "Tankner" in the wake of his vigorous support for the war and, in particular, for the man who was leading it. A study published not long ago about the war by Keshev, which monitors media coverage, awarded first place to Maariv for supporting the failed war in Lebanon.

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Dankner led the chorus of cheerleaders. Five days after the war started, when the debacle was already obvious, he wrote, "It is not easy for us, and certainly not for those who are in the line of fire, but we have the right to support wholeheartedly the greatest strategic surprise of the recent past: The government of Israel surprised both Hamas and especially Hezbollah by not turning tail and not looking for the easy way out by fudging things and capitulating to threats, but showed instead an iron backbone."

Even after publication of the conclusions of the interim report of the Winograd Committee, which is investigating the conduct of the war, Dankner insisted, "We came out of the war with notable achievements ... There is still a tremendous gap between the feelings of the public and the true outcome of the Second Lebanon War."

That statement sounds intriguing in light of the fact that one of Maariv's greatest achievements derived precisely from identifying the public's true feelings. At the beginning of 2005, the paper, spearheaded by Dankner, launched a spontaneous campaign called "Where is the shame?" which targeted governmental corruption. It began with a pungent and much-talked-about article co-written by Dankner and Dan Margalit, and continued with an admirable effort to publish as many exclusives as possible about corrupt politicians. Not even Olmert escaped unscathed. In the spring of 2005, a front-page headline in Maariv stated that during their period in the Likud, Olmert and Tzipi Livni (justice minister at the time) appointed members of the party's central committee as public representatives in the labor courts. But within a few months Dankner got tired and the anti-corruption campaign ended. Maariv ran no scoops about Olmert during the election campaign.

Along with devotion to Olmert, Dankner also demonstrated loyalty to his bosses, Ofer and Jackob Nimrodi. Under the previous editor, Yaakov Erez, being sympathetic to the publisher was considered a distasteful dictate which had to be lived with, but under Dankner this became an official ideology, almost a source of pride.

Dankner believed that the struggle against Moshe Mizrahi, the head of the police investigations branch at the time, who had brought about the Nimrodis' conviction on criminal charges, and against the state prosecutor, Edna Arbel, who supervised the investigation, was a just cause that had to be conducted openly and with no holds barred. In addition to encouraging reports about Mizrahi, Arbel and others in the "rule-of-law gang," Dankner himself wrote particularly blunt articles on the subject. He likened Mizrahi to "the eternal director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover," and in the paper's campaign against Arbel's appointment to the Supreme Court, wrote that she was "a mediocre, manipulative, brutal woman for whom every whisper of internal criticism looks like an orgy of heresy and who sees every opinion that is contrary to hers as an appalling crime.

Dankner explained his management philosophy to a senior reporter who has since moved to Yedioth. "I believe in a trembling earth policy," he told her. "The more the earth trembles beneath the feet of the employees, the more they are energized and challenged." If we add to this Machiavellian approach the paper's increasingly grave financial situation, which has led to repeated personnel cuts, it becomes clear why Dankner's tenure will be remembered by many of the paper's journalists as six years of anxiety. This, of course, did little to improve their work.

The wave of dismissals began within months of Dankner's appointment. As part of a policy to make the paper younger and to slash the budget, he fired or caused the departure of a large number of experienced reporters and editors. The list included Haggai Segal, who was a member of the Jewish terrorist underground in the 1980s ("Dankner thought my writing was boring and repetitive," he says), and the satirists Ephraim Sidon and Meir Uziel. Some of those who lost their jobs found out about it in an unusual way: by reading the news in the media column of the Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir. "A reporter [from Ha'ir] called me to ask for my reaction to being fired from Maariv," recalls Aviva Saltzman, then a correspondent for the paper. "I replied, 'I haven't been fired, what are you talking about?' The reporter said he would check again. He called back to say that Dankner had told him I was fired. Today it sounds almost amusing." Also almost amusing is the fact that a few months later, Saltzman's replacement, Hagai Krauss, whom Dankner brought in from the entertainment weekly Rating, got a call from a Ha'ir reporter informing him that he, too, had been axed.

In the face of mounting criticism, Dankner introduced the institution of the "hearing" prior to dismissal. In a hearing for a senior editor, Dankner told him, "The salary you get is like the bloodletting of the paper."

The most significant dismissal was that of the veteran columnist Ron Maiberg, who says he tried for two years to persuade Ofer Nimrodi to bring Dankner to the paper. "Maiberg's dismissal and the series of humiliations he underwent at Dankner's hands was a warning signal for us all," says a reporter on the paper. "We understood that our editor could be our best buddy and the next moment dump us with a knife in our back. It was scary."

It began idyllically. "During Dankner's tenure I hardly ever came to the paper," Maiberg recalls."After I stopped editing the weekly magazine I was rarely in the building. One day I chanced to come to Dankner's office during an editorial meeting. I stood at the entrance so as not to interfere. Dankner got up, walked over to me, got down on all fours, brushed off my shoe and kissed my foot. He said something like 'Here is a force of nature.' It was so embarrassing I wanted to die. After all, I didn't think he admired me all that much."

Subsequently Maiberg was asked by the editor of the weekly magazine, Uriah Shavit, to give up his personal column and write reportorial pieces for the magazine. Their meeting ended on a discordant note. In an interview he gave to the "Who's against whom" column that week , Maiberg said, "I would suggest to Dankner not to forget how he got to Maariv. I brought him in after a three-year campaign. And it was no simple matter." Maiberg was fired the next day. In an interview published elsewhere, Maiberg stated: "The place [Maariv] resembles the site of a terrorist attack." Dankner subsequently said Maiberg could return to the paper if he apologized. Maiberg apologized in another interview to Ha'ir, but only recently started writing for the paper again.

Dankner fired me because I said nasty things about him in public," Maiberg says in an interview. "I'm not sure he had many choices. It absolutely does not interest me what he tried to prove and to whom. What I remember is the burning hurt, the affront and the feeling of injustice. He was not there alone. Did he owe this act to himself? I don't know. I am more mentally connected to arguments of principle we had about journalism. He was critical of things I wrote at that time, and part of his criticism was right. It is very tempting to join the critics, but my friendship with Dankner was more than working with and for him."

If the dismissals could always be attributed to the paper's dire financial straits, it is hard to justify Dankner's attitude toward the staff. Probably the overriding cause of the hostility toward him, which is shared by those who left the paper and most of those who remain, is his personality. Many of those who have engaged him in lengthy professional dialogue speak of overbearingness, arrogance, coarseness and cruelty per se. There were conversations that ended with a sarcastic jibe, insults such as throwing darts or conducting lengthy telephone calls when his interlocutor is in mid-sentence, and of course the flying shoes.

Editors at Maariv recall instances when he asked editors to say what they thought about another edition's work in the person's presence and encouraged the public humiliation. When Dankner visited one of the paper's departments, an editor relates, "The editors shut up and buried their gaze in the computer screen. Others simply disappeared, even graphic artists and proofreaders. He simply projected terror, and with a contemptuous look he would start going through the pages and mutter, 'a shitty article,' 'utterly imbecilic,' 'absolutely terrible.'"

Another editor: "One time an editor came to him with the pages for closing the paper. He took them and asked her, 'What is this drek [crap]? What is this stuff?' He then threw them in the air."

A former editor: "His mood shifted from one minute to the next. From a fatherly, embracing editor he was capable of turning into someone evil and cunning. Ten minutes later he would be the kind uncle again. We worked with him as editors intensively, from morning to evening. Psychologically, we paid a price. After I left Maariv it took me a long time, and the same with others, to recover from the trauma. We came out of there like battered women."

The journalist Dankner cultivated most at Maariv was Ron Leshem, the author of the best-seller "If There is a Heaven," which was afterward made into a film called "Beaufort." The young Leshem (he is now 30) was brought from Yedioth Ahronoth to head the news department. Leshem, who declined to be interviewed for this article, brought in his wake a group of other young people who tried, and sometimes succeeded, to enliven the news pages.

Senior editors at Maariv say that Leshem, who now works for Channel 2, sold Dankner on the "info-tainment" concept: a fusion of information and entertainment, which gradually began to take over in Maariv. "One time Avi Bettelheim [the paper's deputy editor] said that if we were to count the number of items about 'A Star Is Born' [Israel's version of "American Idol"] in comparison to those on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 'A Star Is Born' would come out ahead," says a former senior editor.

The editor of the op-ed page, Ben Dror Yemini, was also not pleased. "Dankner could have been an excellent editor - he has the potential - but he wasn't," he says. "At a certain point he abandoned the paper to young and talented people. For a long time they have controlled the paper, not him. He is editor in name, but not in practice. He trusts them, they are fine technicians, but they are not appropriate for leading a newspaper."

Leshem's "youngsters" joined other favorites of the editor, such as Chanoch Daum, Nadav Eyal and others. They were able to sit with him for long conversations about everything under the sun. He treated some of them paternally. Sometimes he spent weeks to obtain an old book by Chekhov or a rare copy of a book by Jerome K. Jerome for them. That group enjoyed Dankner's charisma and intelligence immensely.

To me he is the last legendary editor," Eyal says. "It is impossible to deny that he is unchallenged as a creative-writing-journalistic authority. He is a journalist, not someone who was brought in from an investigative program on TV. He is someone for whom writing has been his profession for decades, and in my view he is the best writer in the Israeli press. And if only because of that, he is the last legendary editor."

With the youngsters, Dankner liked to tell stories about himself that played up his virtues. "It is terribly important for him that others know he is a gifted writer," one of them says. At the same time, he showed that he could be considerate and humane. He sent thousands of shekels from his salary to a reporter who was in a desperate financial situation. He also helped out in a medical emergency that struck a reporter's mother.

Ben Caspit, the diplomatic correspondent, is also considered a Dankner confidant. "He saved my career," Caspit says. It was Caspit who first reported the fact that Yossi Ginossar, a former ranking Mossad espionage agency official, was the money man for the Palestinian Authority. "You should be aware that Dankner and Ginossar are close friends," Azrad Lev, Ginossar's partner, who gave Caspit the story, told the reporter.

Caspit: "I went to Dankner with the story and he did not hesitate and did not scratch his head. He was upset and above all shocked, and I remember him saying, 'That bastard tricked me all these years.'" The investigative report on Ginossar received prominent space, and the relations between Dankner and Ginossar were severed. Dankner did not go to Ginossar's funeral.

Dankner, then, was capable of being a journalist, a friend and a good companion when he wanted to be. At the same time, those who worked under him never ceased to be amazed at the management mistakes he made time and again. For example, he voiced his opinions of editors and reporters freely. A senior correspondent: "It was done in the most childish way. The deputy editor, Avi Bettleheim, would leave the room, and behind his back Dankner would make the most childish and filthy gesture. Or an editor would come into his office and he would turn the computer screen toward him and say, 'I am in the middle of an article, read it and tell me what you think.' The flummoxed editor would read and say, 'Well, it's really good.' Then Dankner would scroll up and with a look of contempt would show him the writer's name: Bettleheim."

Bettelheim, who has announced that he will be leaving the paper because he was not appointed to succeed Dankner, belongs to the paper's more veteran group, many of whom left after Dankner surrounded himself with the younger staffers. The problem is that many of the latter - the latest is Leshem's deputy, Hilik Shrir - have also since left Maariv.

Aviv Evron, one of no fewer than five editors of the weekly magazine whom Dankner appointed and fired in the past six years, is a distant relative of his. He too was ousted after he tried to find out whether the rumors of his removal were true. After he left, Evron sent a letter to Nimrodi, with copies to senior staff at Maariv, describing Dankner's behavior. At its conclusion, Evron relates that in his farewell meeting with the publisher, he said, "When I came to Maariv I thought that only death would us part," to which Nimrodi replied, "But then came the angel of death and parted the two of you."

Evron recently turned down an offer to become chief editor of the Maariv Internet site NRG. "All in all, I am grateful to Dankner," he says. "Sometimes I think that as a relative, he did me a hidden favor by showing me the way out of his Maariv. I hope, for the sake of my many friends who are still with the paper, that it will soon be a different Maariv."

In response to this story, Ofer Nimrodi praised Amnon Dankner. "On a professional level, Dankner helped Maariv advance and brought quality people to the newspaper. We worked together for six years, which were characterized by harmony, mutual respect and love. The dramatic changes in the media world have hurt print journalism on a global scale, and Maariv is no exception to the rule. Dankner was forced to reduce personnel and improve the system - actions that in their very nature are unpopular. In addition, the disagreement between the majority shareholders (Nimrodi) and the minority shareholders (Gusinsky) made things very difficult. Despite all that, Dankner led several important moves. Maariv is a pro-Israeli and patriotic newspaper, it has fought corruption and has tried and succeeded in unifying the people through the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. The newspaper has also served as a watchdog when it comes to the police and the state proescutor's office, who are much more careful today before issuing unsubstantial accusations. There were mistakes, but he who does not work at all, does not make mistakes."

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