Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday June 13, 2008

Raking muck, Israeli style: Top TV journalist makes S.F. stop

by dan pine
staff writer

Journalist Ilana Dayan chuckles when others compare her long-running Israeli TV news magazine, “Uvdah,” to “60 Minutes.” It’s a nice compliment, but not entirely accurate.

For starters, she estimates the budget for a single Mike Wallace “gotcha” segment would bankroll her entire show for a year.

On the other hand, like the venerable CBS program, Dayan’s show covers the wide, wide world of news, from an hourlong grilling of the Israeli prime minister to a look at a group of Israeli vegetarians who eat nothing cooked (their slogan: “The whole world is a salad”).

Since 1993, Dayan has been the chief correspondent for “Uvdah” (Hebrew for “fact”), as well as host of a daily radio show, which makes her one of Israel’s most recognizable journalists. It’s a mantle she does not take lightly.

She says the Israeli press is “very aggressive, very curious, very fast on its feet, very skeptical, sometimes cynical. All of this is true.”

Dayan will have a chance to expound on that when she delivers a keynote speech at the 14th annual Guardians of Democracy dinner, a fundraiser for the New Israel Fund, on Thursday, June 19 in San Francisco.

Her speech will attempt to shed light on the conflicting dynamics in Israeli society: Arab vs. Jew, secular vs. religious, Jewish vs. democratic.

“I will try to convey a sense of Israel both as a civil society and yet a country very much engaged in a fight for its own existence,” she says. “These two agendas basically don’t coincide. You can hardly incorporate them in the fabric of one nation. This is a uniquely Israeli experiment. You cannot think of another modern nation trying to be both.”

As for the present-day headlines, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s possible indictment, Dayan says that Israeli cynicism is in full-blown snark mode.

“Israelis are quite accustomed now to the shifts in our [national] mood,” she says. “We have come to terms with the fact that we have a scandal of the month.”

As Israeli TV is hard to pick up here, Dayan’s face and name might not be familiar to every attendee at the New Israel Fund event. Back home, she’s the quintessential TV journalist-as-rock star, though she says that wears thin.

“I cannot evade the fact that I am considered kind of a celebrity,” she says. “I always joke that I live at the corner of Britney Spears and Ed Murrow. People see you as a celebrity, and for that you’re admired and loved. On the other hand, the profession does not mandate that from the audience. It’s an inherent contradiction.”

Of Russian descent, Dayan was born in Argentina. At age 6, her family made aliyah. Her interest in journalism developed during her military service and came about accidentally.

Her commanding officers gave her two options: intelligence or military radio. She chose the latter, and at the age of 18, Dayan was on the air. By 19, she was the IDF’s parliamentary correspondent, and by 20, she was reading the morning news.

Her star continued to rise. At age 23, Dayan became the first woman anchor of “New Evening,” a television interview program in Israel. But she interrupted her broadcasting career to study law, first at Tel Aviv University and then Yale. The very day she earned her law degree, Dayan received a call from Israel.

“I was contacted by one of the companies competing in the bid for running the first commercial channel in Israel,” she recalls of those early conversations about launching an Israeli news magazine for television. “It was Channel 2, where I work to this day.”

Over the years, she has covered everything from Israel’s top rock stars to its poorest citizens. Dayan has also covered the terrorism beat, reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. “It’s not even controversial,” she says. “It’s not sleeping with the enemy. People want to see and understand.”

Though she admires her counterparts in American broadcast journalism, she sees differences between the American and Israeli styles.

“Characteristics that make American media too patriotic and submissive and sometimes self-censored are less evident [in Israel],” she says. “Call it chutzpah, but Israelis are prepared to ventilate the dark past of our lives, our fiascos, our wrongdoings, our evils.”

And though the days of Barbara Walters brokering deals between Begin and Sadat seem to be over, Dayan isn’t so sure.

“It can happen again,” she says. “There was something magic about that. But there was a moment of grace and two leaders ready to grasp it. That’s what we lack today: a moment of grace and admirable leaders.”

The New Israel Fund’s 14th annual Guardians of Democracy Dinner tales place 6 p.m. Thursday, June 19 at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, 465 California St., S.F. Tickets: $250. Information: (415) 543-5055 or www.nif.org/guardian.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.