The defense unveiled a new attack on Tuesday against the prosecution in the public corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Elovitch family, portraying the Walla website as needing special access to the prime minister to lift its relevance as a news site.
If the Jerusalem District Court accepts this claim, it could undermine the idea that the only reason Walla would slant coverage positively toward Netanyahu would be as part of a media bribery scheme.
As part of Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla Media Bribery Affair, Bezeq and Walla owner Shaul Elovitch, and his wife, Iris, are both accused of bribing Netanyahu with slanted positive coverage at Walla in exchange for government favoritism toward Bezeq.
Tuesday was the sixth day of cross-examination of former Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua.
But it was the first day of questions by Iris Elovitch lawyer Michal Rozin-Ozer, who portrayed Walla – before its access to Netanyahu – as a predominantly quasi-porno website thriving on low-scale gossip stories.
When the prosecution presented its case, Yeshua tried to present Walla as weak in the news when he started there in 2006, but as already having a strong news reputation before the Netanyahus allegedly started to dominate the site in 2013.
But Rozin-Ozer presented examples of low-brow gossip stories that Walla was running even after the alleged turning point with Netanyahu in 2013.
According to her evidence, Yeshua was desperate to do anything to please Netanyahu in order to try to give the news portion of the website the gravitas that it seemed otherwise unable to attain.
In addition, Rozin-Ozer presented a series of examples in which Yeshua intervened in his website’s content on behalf of former Labor Party leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid and former Kulanu Party leader Moshe Kahlon.
She said that these cases proved that Yeshua was a serial pleaser of politicians to advance his website’s status and not merely indebted to Netanyahu for some kind of media bribery scheme.
Yeshua even admitted that the Elovitch couple had nothing to do with some of his interventions.
On an entirely separate front, Yeshua discussed his and Elovitch’s aversion to negative coverage of Yediot Aharonot owner Arnon “Nuni” Mozes.
Elovitch had instructed Yeshua to be in touch with various messengers of Mozes about how to handle controversial issues that might come up related to Yediot or Mozes.
All of these examples were part of Rozin-Ozer’s presentation that the Walla-Netanyahu relationship was not as unique as Yeshua and the prosecution made it out to be.
However, the prosecution and Yeshua have repeated that both in quantity – alleging 315 incidents of Netanyahu interventions in Walla coverage between 2013-2016 – and in terms of the regulatory side, relations with the prime minister were unique.
The prosecution says that Elovitch’s providing slanted coverage for Netanyahu to get favorable regulatory treatment for Bezeq, which had nothing to do with Walla other than that Elovitch owned both companies, is strong proof of a bribery scheme.
The hearing ended about 40 minutes early after the lawyers received a warning from court security that the nearby east Jerusalem area might soon become problematic, but the trial is expected to resume on Wednesday as scheduled.