Wiki, the Chaos Controlled
By Israel Shamir
In the art of surveillance, there is a cunning ploy, familiar to the readers of Le Carre: the target is followed by a clumsy gumshoe; he discovers he is being tailed, easily shakes the tail off and goes on, feeling secure and unobserved. Unbeknownst to him, there are other detectives who stick to him like glue and follow him to his perdition. Professionally it is called a “double tail”.
Apparently, some of us were duped by such a ruse in the peculiar affair of a Zionist plot to infiltrate Wikipedia. This powerful online encyclopaedia is ostensibly free and open: everyone can be an editor, add or edit any entry. Editors remain anonymous; their true identity is hidden behind a nickname. This rule has a serious drawback: using this anonymity, a dedicated group may infiltrate the system by stealth, distort reality and create a false picture of the world in the eyes of billions. Apparently this script has been recently enacted.
Conspiracy? Yes. Jewish conspiracy? You bet! The damning email exchange was intercepted and published, revealing a radical Zionist plot to bend “Wiki.” A moderate leftist (some would call it ‘tame’) US-based pro-Palestinian site EI revealed that the radical-extremist Zionist organisation CAMERA called for “volunteers who can work as ‘editors’ to ensure” that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia agree with their right-wing-Zionist agenda. This effort was to be kept secret from the media and the public. Stealth and misrepresentation were presented as the keys to success. A CAMERA official advised the volunteers to sign up as editors for Wikipedia and afterwards to avoid editing Israel-related material for a while, in order to “avoid the appearance of being one-topic editors”. The orchestrated effort was to appear as if it were the work of unaffiliated individuals, and for this reason the editors were to avoid picking a user name that marked them as pro-Israel, or that let people know their real name. The emails taught Zionist apprentices how to act in the interests of Israel while using neutral language. The emphasis was on the long run side of the operation: “This is a marathon not a sprint”, a Zionist instructor nicknamed ‘Zeq’ taught his apprentices in the email exchange.
The EI article about this revelation was quite sycophantic towards Wikipedia. It presented Wiki as an objective source at loggerheads with Zionist infiltrators, and even bordered on advertising: “Openness and good faith are among Wikipedia’s core principles. Any person in the world can write or edit articles, but Wikipedia has strict guidelines and procedures for accountability intended to ensure quality control and prevent vandalism, plagiarism or distortion. It is because of these safeguards that articles on key elements of the Palestine-Israel conflict have generally remained well-referenced, useful and objective.”
Still, it was not enough, and on the next day, 22 April 2008, EI updated this article with a triumphal and calming statement: “a plan by the pro-Israel pressure group CAMERA to skew Wikipedia in a pro-Israel direction appears to have collapsed after it was exposed by EI”. Zeq was dismissed, and anyway, fewer than a dozen of Camera moles were active at the time EI exposed the scheme. In short: everything is fine, Wiki is functioning well, and the Zionist scare is gone, thanks to fearless EI. And anyway, it was only a small operation by the enemies of freedom, and it is over.
Excuse me, is this an article, or a paid advertisement for Wikipedia? Did EI receive on evening April 21st an offer they could not refuse from the owner of Wiki? Only a Zionist can think that Wiki “articles on key elements of the Palestine-Israel conflict have generally remained well-referenced, useful and objective.” On the contrary, they are biased in the extreme; just read, for instance, an exceedingly hostile entry on Hamas, including its Talk, i.e. discussions of editors, deletions and corrections. It defines Hamas as “… best known for multiple suicide bombings and other attacks directed against civilians [known to whom? To me it is best known as the ruling party of Palestine, and secondly, as grassroots mutual assistance movement – ISH]… Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel [while all prominent Israeli parties joined in destruction of Palestine – ISH] … the organization is described by many as antisemitic.” Is that objective? Further the entry says, inter alia: Hamas is considered by the US a terrorist organisation. This is true, but not the whole truth. I personally added: However, Russia refused to consider Hamas a terrorist organisation. My addition was immediately removed by ever-watchful Zionist case-officer. Hamas is terrorist, full stop.
Only a dishonest fool, or a man who never used Wikipedia, may think that plan of the Lobby “to skew Wikipedia in a pro-Israel direction appears to have collapsed”. The clumsy gumshoe was shaken off, for Camera is but a bunch of amateurs, extreme Jewish nationalists with some nuisance value. They do not represent the Jewish mainstream; but they do play a useful part: they make the mainstream appear moderate. Being hassled by Camera is like being hassled by the Klan – it proves nothing. They hassle everybody, even moderate Zionists and other fellow-philosemites whom Camera fanatics consider insufficiently zealous, such as Johann Hari, an English professional philosemite who recently boasted: “I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me ‘a Jew-lover’’. Later he strayed farther afield and wrote about Israeli sewage pouring all over Gaza. Afterwards, he complained, “Camera said I am an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels.”
Now, when the amateurs are disgraced and gone, the professionals remain. Wiki is as partial to Jews as the Jewish Chronicle. The picture of the world it offers is being edited and shaped in full accordance with general Jewish world view thanks to a group of permanent and devoted editors and arbiters.
Freedom to add and edit is just a bait attracting millions unpaid contributors. If Wiki were truly free, provided that “ordinary people’ are in vast majority, we could expect to find a democratic world view, not one not perverted by a biased minority, but the real Wikipedia does not work that way. The apparent chaos of Wiki is strictly controlled by a hierarchy of Agents Smith, who secure the Wiki matrix. They delete references to Jewish misdeeds, but emphasize every good deed by a Jew. Israel/Palestine is just one area in what is truly universal agenda. For instance, they block and remove attempts to mention the Jewish origin of the founder of Satanist movement, one La Vey (originally Levy), though this explains his hatred towards Christianity. They insist on inferiority of Poincare versus Einstein, of Jung versus Freud or Proudhon versus Marx. Every act against Jews is recorded; every act of Jews against goyim is blotted out from this organised memory of our generation. These editors can manage just fine, thank you, without amateur infiltrators.
Zeq has been banned for his indiscretions, but the man he wrote of so admiringly, whom he described as their role model to his apprentices (“work with him and learn from him”), an ideal,. effective Zionist Wikipedia editor called Jayjg, is still there. Jayjg is not just an editor; he is an arbiter, what passes for a judge on the Wikipedia. He was appointed to that position by the site owner himself. He is an Agent Smith of the Wiki matrix. One may see his work in many, many entries: clever and unscrupulous, he is a master of the subterfuge and deceit.
Another, superior Agent Smith is Cberlet or John Foster (Chip) Berlet, the scourge of the web. He is acting under many names. He is a collaborator with the ADL, the Jewish thought police. Though he previously denied having any relationship to ADL, he admitted to Israeli Foreign Affairs that he “had had quite a cordial professional relationship with the ADL" and “had been doing research in cooperation with ADL”. The New York City Jewish newspaper "Forward" reported that Berlet transferred information from FBI anti-Communist informer directly to ADL. Ace Hayes wrote: “John Foster “Chip” Berlet has been involved, over the past half decade, in attacking virtually every independent critic of the Imperial State that the reader can name.” His operation is financed by Ford Foundation. Michael Collins Piper in his monumental book on the Kennedy assassination, Final Judgment, asserts that Chip Berlet is a CIA agent. Naturally, his own entry in Wiki is protected from editing. The Arbitration committee (those who hold the reigns of power on the Wiki) “admit to hero-worship of Cberlet’, as I was informed by a prominent insider.
These men are discreet, they won’t babble about their devotion to the Jewish cause; they hide it under the veil of bureaucratic expressions and abbreviations. Their supporting cast includes some Jewish “antizionists” like RolandR. This is actually a British Trotskyite trade union apparatchik Roland Rance, who does not mind to cooperate with convinced anti-Communist, CIA and ADL agent Berlet and with zealous Zionist Jayjg. So much for his antizionism and his socialism! He, and thousands of smaller wanna-be Agents Smith did not need the starry-eyed arch-Zionists of CAMERA, they are already in.
The “revelation” of EI is nothing but a subterfuge, a “double tail” executed to increase our trust in Wiki. A similar “double tail” operation was performed last year, when Wiki announced it had found CIA-made edits on a few pages. Careful reading of that “revelation” was even more disappointing than that of EI. The worst discovered CIA edit of President Ahmadinejad entry was ‘added exclamation “Wahhhhhh!”, while “other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.” This is ridiculous: the US secret services spend many billions per annum in their drive for domination of the Web. A recent report speaks of $30 billion allocated by the Pentagon for an “electronic Manhattan Project” in order to fight the Web. And they want us to believe that all these billions produced an exclamation “Wahhhhhh!”? Alas, it is just another “double tail” sting by the usual suspects.
2
The Wiki entries on Palestine/Israel are far from “well-referenced, useful and objective” as the dupes of EI claim. On the second thought, are they dupes, or willing collaborators? The top man in EI is Electronic Ali, as Ali Abunima is nicknamed, the man who began the witch hunt against “Shamir the antisemite”. He is the Arab front for various exclusively Jewish organisations for Palestine, who rather promote the Jewish cause and fight antisemitism. Such Jewish bodies like to have a compliant shabbesgoy (as Rosa Luxemburg called these guys) for a front, and Ali fits the bill perfectly. Even this article on Wiki has some reference to ‘evil antisemites’.
In his attack on me, Electronic Ali acted together with the execrable Hussein Ibish, but since then, the thieves have fallen apart.[1] Another prominent EI person is, or was, Nigel Parry, a British antisemitism-fighter, their webmaster and probably also their case officer. Nigel Perry is an enforcer of Political Correctness and is Gatekeeper General of the permitted discourse on Palestine, keeping it between hard Likud and the soft Peace Now. He proudly mentions many years of involvement with the Palestinian cause. Well, such guys are a reason why the Palestinian cause looks the way it does.
Why, we could have One State, a single unified state in Israel/Palestine by now, but for these guys. Looking back, it was a possible development in 2001, sometime before 9/11, when my call for One State was heeded by many Israelis and Americans, and supported by major American newspapers. Then these men began their campaign to denigrate me and scared the supporters away. “Shamir is discredited and marginalised”, they wrote with satisfaction. For them, it did not matter that together with me, they discredited and marginalised the idea of One State -- the only possible peaceful solution to our conflict.
The final battle was fought on the Wikipedia site, where Ali-Ibish-Parry provided ammunition to Zionist Agent Smith Jayjg and ADL’s own Barlet, with the ADL-sponsored block of “antifascist” e-zines: British Searchlight, Norwegian Monitor, Swedish Expo, American Trotskyite Socialist Viewpoint et al. These formidable forces were counteracted by our wonderful friend Joh Domingo, a South African fighter against apartheid, and our French friend Omnivore. You can read the protocols of the battle on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israel_Shamir. They decided to make me a Swedish neonazi impostor, instead of the Israeli writer I am.
All the time this battle was going on, I lived in my Jaffa house, receiving endless visitors, giving numerous interviews, going to work, seeing people – but I might as well have been dead. I felt like Doc Daneeka, a character in Joseph Heller’s witty Catch-22, who was declared dead as the plane he was supposed to fly was downed. “I am alive!” he shouted. “Here we have a paper saying you are dead”, they replied. His wife “inherited” his property, he was stricken from the lists, they stopped serving him food, and even his friends and comrades looked askance when he appeared. This is the power of an official-looking document – or a webpage blue with hyperlinks. Thus I have learned the dreadful power of an encyclopaedia: it does not reflect the world, but rather creates the world. Wiki is linked to thousands of sites; whether you look at answers.com or at an Arab English-language site, you’ll be led to Wiki with its lies.
If an encyclopaedia said I am a Swedish neonazi antisemite, nothing could change it. I could scream all day long: “Look, here I am, in Jaffa” but they would reply: “Here we have an official paper saying that you are not”. I am very grateful to Joh Domingo for his superhuman efforts, but he could not overcome the Agents Smith. Neither could I. If tomorrow they decide to make you a little green man from Mars, they will succeed, too. And then, even your friends will look behind you for your flying saucer.
A few days ago, I spoke to a group of Indian intellectuals in Delhi, and afterwards I received this touching letter from Come Carpentier, a French expat writer living in the Indian capital. He wrote: “I meant to thank you for these enlightening, balanced and always objective yet passionate words you spoke that evening...Listening to them dispels even better than reading you the reputation that you have been given by you-know-who as a firebrand defamer of Israel, holocaust denier, Nazi apologist and so on and so forth... Not to mention the rumours about your being a clandestine Swedish Far Right-winger infiltrated in the Holy Land by the international Islamo-Fascist Cabal!”
III
In a way, pro-Jewish bias of Wiki is unavoidable bearing in mind Jewish positions in Western discourse, media and universities. Jews – even people of Jewish origin – are likely to correct discourse in a flattering for them way. They did it hundred years ago, and five hundred years ago. Provided they do it in one direction, they constitute the only entity (besides the undermined Church and its Orders) capable of a marathon (in words of Zeq) - of sustaining a long-run operation.
A hundred years ago, a New York lawyer Samuel Untermeyer financed the first Scofield Reference Bible; since then, the Scofield Bibles are being republished in newer even more pro-Jewish editions and they bring in millions of Christian Zionists.
Joachim Martillo writes in his Judonia: “Jewish efforts benefit from organizational memory that does not exist in other lobbying situations. The longevity of Jewish Federation organizations can give Israel Lobbying efforts a generational aspect not seen elsewhere. For example, Israel Advocacy organizations worked for fifty years to delegitimize Arabists in the Foreign Service and State Department, and replace them with Israel-sympathetic personnel”.
Martllo erroneously connects this result with some specific pro-Israel organisation. Success of Zionism (and incidentally its crimes) is just the strawberry on top of the Jewish success cake. The Jews are engaged in advocacy of Jews, and consequently they delegitimize Arabists, or priests, or independent historians who do not subscribe to the notion that Jews are special in consistently beneficial way. Zionism is a result of Jewish pruning of history, and this pruned history is what we were taught.
There are no Arab sheiks or Russian oligarchs or American oilmen ready to finance anything long term of no immediate relevancy. They do not understand that practically every entry of encyclopaedia, every textbook influence future generations. A correct entry on, say, Poincare or monotheism or Persian invasion could save potential Zionists from their delusions of grandeur.
Wikipedia is a great idea for Jews: people of all nations from all over the world contribute of their knowledge, and then this Summa is pruned in the way acceptable to the pro-Jewish gardeners. Despite its “free” image, Wikipedia is part and parcel of the immense Judaised media holding, and thus is as biased as any other publication of the group from the New York Times (owned by Sulzberger) to Liberation (owned by Rothschild) to hundreds of Murdock papers.
Conclusion
Wikipedia is an important asset, like the New York Times, but both are in the hands of enemies of freedom. Sometimes good and truthful articles or entries are to be found in both, but these are specks of gold dust placed there to salt the dud mine. We certainly want to democratise both; to make both really democratic and accessible. Until this is done, we should explain that both are tools of mind control not to be trusted or taken at face value. If Wiki wants to preserve some of its reliability, it must get rid of its Zionist enforcers. Not only of the CAMERA bumpkins, but of the hard men in black suits, the Agents Smith.
[1] In an article by Osamah Khalil of Berkeley EI deservedly took Ibish to task for his “defense of Abbas’ strategy of deference and obsequiousness to the US and Israel. According to Ibish’s issue paper, Abbas’ problem is not that he is a failed, corrupt and ineffectual leader who appears to Palestinians as an eager American tool, but that he is “uninspiring” and “lacks the charisma that many politicians rely upon, and is not an emotive speaker.” Ibish’s screed, continues EI, “deliberately ignores a thugocracy in Palestinian politics as embodied by Mohammad Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub and their ilk.” His idea of an independent secular Palestinian state is a US-backed government of thieves and their enforcers… Ibish derides reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas as “utopian”, as for him there is no alternative to Abbas’ rule, American hyperpower, and Israel’s military and economic dominance in the Middle East.”
Showing posts with label Zionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zionism. Show all posts
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Eric Alterman: Why Mainline Jews Fear Obama
Hint: Go to the last paragraph.
Eric Alterman
(Some) Jews Against Obama
[from the March 24, 2008 issue]
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/alterman
During the past few months a small group of neoconservative Jews, many of whom hold key positions in the world of official Jewish institutions, have been working to undermine the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama with a series of carefully planted character assassinations and deliberately misleading innuendo. I noticed this trend when Debra Feuer, a counsel for the American Jewish Committee, sent a confidential memo to her counterparts at other organizations criticizing Obama's views on the Middle East, Iran and Syria and attacking him for having once appeared at a fundraiser headlined by the late Edward Said. The memo, reported by the Forward, was immediately disowned, but not denied, by AJC executive director David Harris.
Also throwing his hatchet into the ring was Morton Klein, who heads up the Likud-loving Zionist Organization of America, complaining that "Barack Obama doesn't understand the continuing Arab war against Israel" and terming the notion of an Obama presidency "frightening." He was joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group that professes to speak for all American Jews. Hoenlein told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Obama's talk of "change" could prove "an opening for all kinds of mischief" and gave voice to what he termed "a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign." The Tennessee Republican Party issued a news release noting what it claimed was "a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States."
Let us note first of all that, like every American politician for the past half-century or so with nondelusional presidential aspirations, Obama views the crisis of Israel/Palestine largely through an Israeli lens. He asserts that he would not even be in politics at all were it not for the support he has enjoyed from his local Jewish community. He called Israel one of "our most important allies" and added, "I think that its security is sacrosanct and that the United States has a special relationship with Israel, as I myself do with the Jewish community."
Thanks in part to statements like those, the neoconnish campaign against Obama was not able to gain much traction. Perhaps as a consequence, as the Forward has editorialized, "the attacks on Obama have metastasized into a wide-ranging assault on his associations." These attacks, as blogger Matthew Yglesias notes, have largely amounted to the following: "First Obama was an anti-Semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-Semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to [Commentary's Noah] Pollack [sic] it's Samantha Power who's tainted by Jew-hatred."
The surrogate slurs have come from many sources. Writing on AmericanThinker.com, right-wing blogger Ed Lasky argued that Malley, an Obama adviser and former Clinton national security official, "represents the next generation of anti-Israel activism." CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, took this a step further by investigating Malley's roots and declaring that "Malley's parents were rabidly anti-Israel" and that Malley's articles on Middle East issues "demonize Israel only slightly less than his father." This is nonsense, naturally. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and former State Department officials Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, all of whom worked with Malley, signed a letter denouncing "a series of vicious personal attacks" against him. Regarding the much admired Ms. Power, neocon foreign policy wonk Max Boot has taken his colleague Pollak to task for his misleading attack on her views in Commentary's blog "Contentions," where the attacks originally appeared.
According to a report in Newsweek, Ann Lewis, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, made reference during a conference call with Jewish leaders to Brzezinski, whom she falsely labeled Obama's "chief foreign policy adviser." (In fact, according to Brzezinski, he has advised Obama on a total of one occasion.) While Brzezinski did anger some Jews with his endorsement of the controversial Walt/Mearsheimer book, his views are not only well within the foreign policy mainstream; they are also completely consistent with those expressed by a majority of American Jews--far more so than those hawks who profess to speak in their name.
In a remarkably stupid line of questioning during the final Democratic debate, Tim Russert demanded over and over that Obama reject Louis Farrakhan's kind words for him so that Jews might feel a bit more comfortable with him. (In fact, according to exit polls, Obama has beaten Clinton among Jewish voters in California, Connecticut and Massachusetts, while she has bested him in New York, New Jersey and Maryland.) When Obama decided to indulge Russert and "reject and denounce" Farrakhan, Russert kept up his lunatic line of questioning by demanding that Obama reject Russert's misstated version of his Protestant minister's views as well.
What is it that these neocons and their media mouthpieces really fear about an Obama presidency? Perhaps it is honesty about the issue. Speaking to a largely Jewish audience in Cleveland, Obama explained, "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel." Then came his kicker: "One of the things that struck me when I went to Israel was how much more open the debate was around these issues in Israel than they are sometimes here in the United States." No wonder he scares them so...
Eric Alterman
(Some) Jews Against Obama
[from the March 24, 2008 issue]
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/alterman
During the past few months a small group of neoconservative Jews, many of whom hold key positions in the world of official Jewish institutions, have been working to undermine the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama with a series of carefully planted character assassinations and deliberately misleading innuendo. I noticed this trend when Debra Feuer, a counsel for the American Jewish Committee, sent a confidential memo to her counterparts at other organizations criticizing Obama's views on the Middle East, Iran and Syria and attacking him for having once appeared at a fundraiser headlined by the late Edward Said. The memo, reported by the Forward, was immediately disowned, but not denied, by AJC executive director David Harris.
Also throwing his hatchet into the ring was Morton Klein, who heads up the Likud-loving Zionist Organization of America, complaining that "Barack Obama doesn't understand the continuing Arab war against Israel" and terming the notion of an Obama presidency "frightening." He was joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group that professes to speak for all American Jews. Hoenlein told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Obama's talk of "change" could prove "an opening for all kinds of mischief" and gave voice to what he termed "a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign." The Tennessee Republican Party issued a news release noting what it claimed was "a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States."
Let us note first of all that, like every American politician for the past half-century or so with nondelusional presidential aspirations, Obama views the crisis of Israel/Palestine largely through an Israeli lens. He asserts that he would not even be in politics at all were it not for the support he has enjoyed from his local Jewish community. He called Israel one of "our most important allies" and added, "I think that its security is sacrosanct and that the United States has a special relationship with Israel, as I myself do with the Jewish community."
Thanks in part to statements like those, the neoconnish campaign against Obama was not able to gain much traction. Perhaps as a consequence, as the Forward has editorialized, "the attacks on Obama have metastasized into a wide-ranging assault on his associations." These attacks, as blogger Matthew Yglesias notes, have largely amounted to the following: "First Obama was an anti-Semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-Semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to [Commentary's Noah] Pollack [sic] it's Samantha Power who's tainted by Jew-hatred."
The surrogate slurs have come from many sources. Writing on AmericanThinker.com, right-wing blogger Ed Lasky argued that Malley, an Obama adviser and former Clinton national security official, "represents the next generation of anti-Israel activism." CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, took this a step further by investigating Malley's roots and declaring that "Malley's parents were rabidly anti-Israel" and that Malley's articles on Middle East issues "demonize Israel only slightly less than his father." This is nonsense, naturally. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and former State Department officials Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, all of whom worked with Malley, signed a letter denouncing "a series of vicious personal attacks" against him. Regarding the much admired Ms. Power, neocon foreign policy wonk Max Boot has taken his colleague Pollak to task for his misleading attack on her views in Commentary's blog "Contentions," where the attacks originally appeared.
According to a report in Newsweek, Ann Lewis, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, made reference during a conference call with Jewish leaders to Brzezinski, whom she falsely labeled Obama's "chief foreign policy adviser." (In fact, according to Brzezinski, he has advised Obama on a total of one occasion.) While Brzezinski did anger some Jews with his endorsement of the controversial Walt/Mearsheimer book, his views are not only well within the foreign policy mainstream; they are also completely consistent with those expressed by a majority of American Jews--far more so than those hawks who profess to speak in their name.
In a remarkably stupid line of questioning during the final Democratic debate, Tim Russert demanded over and over that Obama reject Louis Farrakhan's kind words for him so that Jews might feel a bit more comfortable with him. (In fact, according to exit polls, Obama has beaten Clinton among Jewish voters in California, Connecticut and Massachusetts, while she has bested him in New York, New Jersey and Maryland.) When Obama decided to indulge Russert and "reject and denounce" Farrakhan, Russert kept up his lunatic line of questioning by demanding that Obama reject Russert's misstated version of his Protestant minister's views as well.
What is it that these neocons and their media mouthpieces really fear about an Obama presidency? Perhaps it is honesty about the issue. Speaking to a largely Jewish audience in Cleveland, Obama explained, "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel." Then came his kicker: "One of the things that struck me when I went to Israel was how much more open the debate was around these issues in Israel than they are sometimes here in the United States." No wonder he scares them so...
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Stephanie N. Mehta: How Haim Saban works with Hillary Clinton
The man with the golden gut
How Haim Saban, a flinty self-made billionaire, plans to turn Univision into the next great network - and put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Fortune's Stephanie Mehta reports.
By Stephanie N. Mehta, Fortune senior writer
May 1 2007: 10:01 AM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- "May I offer you a cucumber?"
That's how Haim Saban begins his account of the battle for Spanish-language media company Univision. It's an unconventional icebreaker, to be sure, but then again, much about the 62-year-old media entrepreneur is out of the ordinary: He gossips with Rupert Murdoch, vacations with Bill Clinton, throws parties with Steven Spielberg, and confers with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
He is worth an estimated $2.8 billion. Yet he eschews power lunches at the Grill in Los Angeles, choosing instead to eat sushi nearly every weekday with his driver, Laine Burton.
The cucumber, it turns out, is part of an afternoon snack that also includes tomatoes and pepper jack cheese. "It's very low fat," says the fitness-conscious Saban. (He works out an hour or more daily.)
"He could be the subject of a movie or a TV series," former President Bill Clinton told Fortune. "He's a fascinating character."
Despite this ready-for-prime-time personality, Saban (sa-BAHN) has preferred to work behind the scenes. But two events are changing his ability to stage-manage far from the headlines. First, he is attempting to put Senator Hillary Clinton in the White House at a time when Senator Barack Obama is catching fire with L.A.'s Gulfstream liberals. Second, he and a consortium of private-equity players bought Univision, the largest Hispanic media company in the U.S., in March.
The $12.3 billion acquisition battle strained Univision's relations with Mexican media giant and rival bidder Grupo Televisa (Charts), its main supplier of programs. The deal, which should have been a snap to close, has been singled out for some harsh regulatory treatment: Before the Federal Communications Commission signed off on it, the buyers had to agree to pay a hefty $24 million fine to settle charges that the network wasn't airing enough children's programming.
Univision claimed it was meeting its educational mandates by running Complices al Rescate (Friends to the Rescue), a telenovela about 11-year-old twin girls who swap identities. Not exactly Plaza Sesamo.
Fortified by his veggies and cheese, Saban explains why Univision and New York's junior Senator will both be winners in 2008. First, Univision: Under founder A. Jerrold Perenchio, the company had grown to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue, but Saban, who put in a chunk of his own money, and his deep-pocketed partners - Providence Equity Partners, TPG, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Madison Dearborn - think Univision can still grow sales in the double digits. That would be a tall order for ABC, CBS, or NBC, but Saban isn't sweating it, because by the year 2010, the Hispanic population will grow 17% and will be spending about $1.1 trillion a year.
The trouble with Saban's vision is that for now, only a fraction of the top U.S. brands advertise on Univision, partly because some key decision-makers picture its viewers as blue-collar immigrants rather than affluent suburbanites. "Marketing to Hispanics is something that companies need to make a priority," says Caleb Windover, managing director of ad buyer MediaVest's multicultural division. Before Madison Avenue will open the spigot, Univision needs a face to woo its media buyers.
That job falls to new CEO Joe Uva, who most recently ran ad-buying agency OMD. Like his predecessor, Perenchio, Uva doesn't speak Spanish, but he will go out and personally press the flesh with marketers and suppliers. The 76-year-old Perenchio, who declined comment, hadn't been involved in day-to-day operations at Univision for years before it was sold.
The company hasn't named a chairman, and it won't be Saban, who isn't interested in titles. That doesn't mean, however, that he won't be involved. He thinks Univision is leaving money on the table by barely charging the cable and satellite operators to air the network, and he shared a bombshell proposal with Fortune: Charge the operators an unprecedented $1 per subscriber per month for Univision.
To put that in context, CBS earlier this year reportedly got some small operators to pay about 50 cents per viewer per month. Saban boldly suggests that Univision is worth more. "If you are an operator and you have the guts to commit suicide and remove Univision, you'll be... " He trails off, then pretends to wash his hands, the gesture for finito.
Cable operators are sure to balk, but Saban says Univision delivers big market share while CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox have lost viewers to cable, the Internet, and other media. If his fee scheme is successful, Univision could add $1 billion in annual revenue.
It turns out that Saban has had his eye on Univision for the past three years. Back then he went to see the press-shy Perenchio at his Bel Air, Calif., home to let him know of his interest in buying Perenchio's stake in Univision. (The two men aren't close but have common friends, such as CBS CEO Les Moonves.) According to Saban, Perenchio said his Univision holdings weren't for sale but encouraged him to call every month or so, "just to say hello." So Saban started checking in every two weeks.
But he wasn't the only one interested in Univision: Wall Street had long thought Televisa, the Mexican television empire that helped Perenchio acquire Univision in 1992 and thus owned 11% of the company, would be a logical buyer. And indeed, Televisa, along with Bain Capital and Bill Gates' investing arm, Cascade, did put in a $12.2 billion offer for Univision, only to be outbid by Saban and his partners by about $170 million, or 50 cents a share. Just to show that there were hard feelings, the Televisa rep on the Univision board voted against Saban's offer.
Fortunately, the man likes a challenge. In 2003 he led the acquisition of ProSiebenSat.1, a moribund German broadcaster once controlled by the Kirch group. Saban says he had a hard time getting ProSieben's banker to even send him a deal book, he was such a long shot to win the property, which was in bankruptcy.
"All the big muckety-mucks were there," Saban recalls, ticking off the names of A-list moguls whose companies had looked at ProSieben. "You know Mel Karmazin? Rupert Murdoch? Michael Eisner? Dick Parsons? They were all there, and they all went away."
Once he won ProSieben, Saban set about transforming the company, though not all his ideas were well received. He sent its dour newscasters to his friend Murdoch's Fox News to be schooled in pepping up their delivery. He urged management to create a German version of the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea (known to U.S. audiences as Ugly Betty). The German version of the show, Verliebt in Berlin (In Love in Berlin), turned into a huge hit for ProSieben's Sat 1 channel. This spring, as the Univision deal was closing, Saban also completed the sale of his stake in ProSieben to KKR and Permira for about 29 euros a share - more than quadruple what he paid for the company four years ago.
A ribald polyglot who liberally peppers his conversation with phrases in French, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and four-letter words, Saban isn't a numbers guy or even an operational whiz. But with ProSieben and now with Univision, he is showing that entrepreneurial skills and taste-making instincts can succeed on a big scale - and he's doing it with his own money, plus the vast sums of private equity floating around right now.
"This is the story of big-time entrepreneurship," says Jonathan Nelson, managing partner at Providence Equity Partners, which invested in ProSieben with Saban and now is a member of the Univision consortium. "There isn't one model for corporate success anymore. Haim offers a more interesting and human model." Nelson is a seasoned media and telecom investor - his portfolio includes MGM and Warner Music - and he certainly doesn't need access to Saban's capital. Still, Nelson says Saban, with his ability to spot big media opportunities, was the first person he called when Providence was checking out Univision.
Saban's ability to seamlessly glide from East Coast bankers to Israeli pols to Hollywood media moguls can be traced to his peripatetic youth. His father was a toy seller - a child can't imagine a better job for a parent - and the close-knit Jewish family lived modestly in Alexandria, Egypt. When Saban was 12, the Suez Crisis of 1956 erupted, forcing the family out of Egypt to Israel by way of Greece.
They left behind everything, and times were so bad, says Saban's wife, Cheryl, that his mother couldn't even rustle up two pans so that she could bake him a cake to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The experience of poverty "is so deep in the family psyche," says his wife of 20 years - they met when she took a job as his assistant and married a year later - "at some time in Haim's young life, he decided that was never going to happen to him again."
He got his start in show biz as the manager of an Israeli Beatles cover band called the Lions. He came to L.A. in 1983 and began a career as a self-described "cartoon schlepper" who built Japan's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers into Fox Kids, a programming joint venture with Rupert Murdoch that, um, morphed into a national cable network. Disney (Charts, Fortune 500) later purchased it for a stunning $5.2 billion, and Saban pocketed some $1.5 billion - money he has donated to several pet causes, including $7 million for the construction of a new Democratic National Committee headquarters building in Washington, D.C.
Saban wasn't even interested in politics until he met Bill Clinton during his first term as President. The meeting was brief, but the friendship grew as Clinton made dozens of trips to California during his presidency. Clinton, Saban says, ignited his interest in using his resources to find solutions to strife in the Middle East. He soon became the Democratic Party's largest single donor. "I don't say this lightly," says Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee at the time. "Haim Saban saved the Democratic Party."
Now Saban is turning his energies to Hillary Clinton. "I think he likes her better than he likes me," jokes Bill Clinton. But as he talks about Saban's support of Senator Clinton, the former President turns serious. "It is something that" - he pauses - "I can hardly talk about it because it really makes me emotional, 'cause he has genuinely come to love and respect her."
Under current campaign-finance laws, donors can give only $2,300 to a candidate's primary run and another $2,300 for the presidential run. That means that to raise the big money, fundraisers like Saban have to knock on a lot of doors. "He makes all those miserable calls you have to make to get your friends to contribute," says Steven Rattner, managing principal of New York-based investment firm Quadrangle and an active Democrat. "He's quite relentless."
For Senator Clinton's run, he has hosted events at his office and at his Beverly Park estate, a sprawling mansion in a gated community that is also home to Reba McEntire, Rod Stewart, Sylvester Stallone, Denzel Washington, and Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone. Saban, Steven Spielberg, and News Corp. (Charts, Fortune 500) executive Peter Chernin are hosting another fundraiser for Clinton in late May.
He tells of traveling with her on his jet (she paid her way, he insists) when the pilot informed him an engine had gone out. Saban says he excitedly conveyed this information to Clinton, who thanked him and went back to her reading. He later asked her how she managed to stay so calm. According to Saban, Clinton explained that she was in the middle of a good paragraph in her book and that there was little she could do about the situation, so why freak out? "This is magnificent!" Saban practically shouts. "This is what you want in a leader. Nobody touches her. She's really the most qualified candidate."
Some of the Clintons' former supporters disagree, most notably fellow mogul and master fundraiser David Geffen, who is backing Barack Obama. (He has also made a contribution to former Senator John Edwards's campaign.) The same week Geffen threw a star-studded fundraiser for the Illinois Senator, he trashed the Clintons, essentially calling them liars, in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Saban's response is uncharacteristically subdued. "I'll make three observations," he says crisply. "David is a friend of mine. David is a very smart guy. I don't understand where he's coming from. But let's you and I agree that there are other aspects of this race that are interesting beyond what David Geffen is saying."
Perhaps he's being polite, or maybe he's trying to stop himself from gloating: Clinton is running only slightly ahead of Obama in money from lawyers, and she's trailing in donations from teachers, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. In the entertainment industry, though, she's outgunning her rival by about 22%. Much of that can be attributed to Saban, who by early May had raised $1 million for Clinton, the most by any individual fundraiser. Call it the Haim effect.
Will the Haim effect also work its magic on Univision? "I would like to stress that I am the smallest investor in Univision. Every deal needs a face," he says. (When the choice is one of four private-equity firms or Saban, the guy who wrote the music for Inspector Gadget, can you blame the press for picking Saban?) Indeed, the other investors each put up about $1 billion of the capital for the deal, with Saban kicking in about $300 million of his own money. The group borrowed the rest.
But Saban's charm could also be a valuable asset to Univision in its efforts to smooth relations with Televisa, run by Mexico's powerful Azcárraga family. The late Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, a billionaire known as El Tigre, not only invested in Univision but also supplied it with Televisa's popular (and occasionally risqué) telenovelas. His son, current Televisa CEO Emilio Azcárraga Jean, sat on the Univision board for several years until he abruptly quit in May 2005. The relationship between the companies deteriorated from there, and Televisa sued Univision, saying it wasn't getting the royalties it deserved for its programming. "I know both sides" of that conflict, says Murdoch. "I would say it is very, very difficult, but if there's anyone who can mend that fence, it would be Haim."
As it turns out, Saban is already trying to make nice with Televisa. For starters, he has an existing relationship with the Mexican broadcaster, which aired his kids' programs in the 1990s. He also speaks Spanish. But mostly Saban brings to the table what business school professors might blandly call "people skills," though in Saban's hands the delivery is anything but bland.
During a visit to Televisa before the deal closed, for example, Saban and associate Adam Chesnoff toured a school the company runs for teaching the art of producing telenovelas. The two men watched a taping, and between scenes Saban danced on the set with a dozen actresses. Talk about breaking the ice. Perhaps next time he'll offer them a cucumber.
From the May 14, 2007 issue
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How Haim Saban, a flinty self-made billionaire, plans to turn Univision into the next great network - and put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Fortune's Stephanie Mehta reports.
By Stephanie N. Mehta, Fortune senior writer
May 1 2007: 10:01 AM EDT
(Fortune Magazine) -- "May I offer you a cucumber?"
That's how Haim Saban begins his account of the battle for Spanish-language media company Univision. It's an unconventional icebreaker, to be sure, but then again, much about the 62-year-old media entrepreneur is out of the ordinary: He gossips with Rupert Murdoch, vacations with Bill Clinton, throws parties with Steven Spielberg, and confers with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
He is worth an estimated $2.8 billion. Yet he eschews power lunches at the Grill in Los Angeles, choosing instead to eat sushi nearly every weekday with his driver, Laine Burton.
The cucumber, it turns out, is part of an afternoon snack that also includes tomatoes and pepper jack cheese. "It's very low fat," says the fitness-conscious Saban. (He works out an hour or more daily.)
"He could be the subject of a movie or a TV series," former President Bill Clinton told Fortune. "He's a fascinating character."
Despite this ready-for-prime-time personality, Saban (sa-BAHN) has preferred to work behind the scenes. But two events are changing his ability to stage-manage far from the headlines. First, he is attempting to put Senator Hillary Clinton in the White House at a time when Senator Barack Obama is catching fire with L.A.'s Gulfstream liberals. Second, he and a consortium of private-equity players bought Univision, the largest Hispanic media company in the U.S., in March.
The $12.3 billion acquisition battle strained Univision's relations with Mexican media giant and rival bidder Grupo Televisa (Charts), its main supplier of programs. The deal, which should have been a snap to close, has been singled out for some harsh regulatory treatment: Before the Federal Communications Commission signed off on it, the buyers had to agree to pay a hefty $24 million fine to settle charges that the network wasn't airing enough children's programming.
Univision claimed it was meeting its educational mandates by running Complices al Rescate (Friends to the Rescue), a telenovela about 11-year-old twin girls who swap identities. Not exactly Plaza Sesamo.
Fortified by his veggies and cheese, Saban explains why Univision and New York's junior Senator will both be winners in 2008. First, Univision: Under founder A. Jerrold Perenchio, the company had grown to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue, but Saban, who put in a chunk of his own money, and his deep-pocketed partners - Providence Equity Partners, TPG, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Madison Dearborn - think Univision can still grow sales in the double digits. That would be a tall order for ABC, CBS, or NBC, but Saban isn't sweating it, because by the year 2010, the Hispanic population will grow 17% and will be spending about $1.1 trillion a year.
The trouble with Saban's vision is that for now, only a fraction of the top U.S. brands advertise on Univision, partly because some key decision-makers picture its viewers as blue-collar immigrants rather than affluent suburbanites. "Marketing to Hispanics is something that companies need to make a priority," says Caleb Windover, managing director of ad buyer MediaVest's multicultural division. Before Madison Avenue will open the spigot, Univision needs a face to woo its media buyers.
That job falls to new CEO Joe Uva, who most recently ran ad-buying agency OMD. Like his predecessor, Perenchio, Uva doesn't speak Spanish, but he will go out and personally press the flesh with marketers and suppliers. The 76-year-old Perenchio, who declined comment, hadn't been involved in day-to-day operations at Univision for years before it was sold.
The company hasn't named a chairman, and it won't be Saban, who isn't interested in titles. That doesn't mean, however, that he won't be involved. He thinks Univision is leaving money on the table by barely charging the cable and satellite operators to air the network, and he shared a bombshell proposal with Fortune: Charge the operators an unprecedented $1 per subscriber per month for Univision.
To put that in context, CBS earlier this year reportedly got some small operators to pay about 50 cents per viewer per month. Saban boldly suggests that Univision is worth more. "If you are an operator and you have the guts to commit suicide and remove Univision, you'll be... " He trails off, then pretends to wash his hands, the gesture for finito.
Cable operators are sure to balk, but Saban says Univision delivers big market share while CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox have lost viewers to cable, the Internet, and other media. If his fee scheme is successful, Univision could add $1 billion in annual revenue.
It turns out that Saban has had his eye on Univision for the past three years. Back then he went to see the press-shy Perenchio at his Bel Air, Calif., home to let him know of his interest in buying Perenchio's stake in Univision. (The two men aren't close but have common friends, such as CBS CEO Les Moonves.) According to Saban, Perenchio said his Univision holdings weren't for sale but encouraged him to call every month or so, "just to say hello." So Saban started checking in every two weeks.
But he wasn't the only one interested in Univision: Wall Street had long thought Televisa, the Mexican television empire that helped Perenchio acquire Univision in 1992 and thus owned 11% of the company, would be a logical buyer. And indeed, Televisa, along with Bain Capital and Bill Gates' investing arm, Cascade, did put in a $12.2 billion offer for Univision, only to be outbid by Saban and his partners by about $170 million, or 50 cents a share. Just to show that there were hard feelings, the Televisa rep on the Univision board voted against Saban's offer.
Fortunately, the man likes a challenge. In 2003 he led the acquisition of ProSiebenSat.1, a moribund German broadcaster once controlled by the Kirch group. Saban says he had a hard time getting ProSieben's banker to even send him a deal book, he was such a long shot to win the property, which was in bankruptcy.
"All the big muckety-mucks were there," Saban recalls, ticking off the names of A-list moguls whose companies had looked at ProSieben. "You know Mel Karmazin? Rupert Murdoch? Michael Eisner? Dick Parsons? They were all there, and they all went away."
Once he won ProSieben, Saban set about transforming the company, though not all his ideas were well received. He sent its dour newscasters to his friend Murdoch's Fox News to be schooled in pepping up their delivery. He urged management to create a German version of the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea (known to U.S. audiences as Ugly Betty). The German version of the show, Verliebt in Berlin (In Love in Berlin), turned into a huge hit for ProSieben's Sat 1 channel. This spring, as the Univision deal was closing, Saban also completed the sale of his stake in ProSieben to KKR and Permira for about 29 euros a share - more than quadruple what he paid for the company four years ago.
A ribald polyglot who liberally peppers his conversation with phrases in French, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and four-letter words, Saban isn't a numbers guy or even an operational whiz. But with ProSieben and now with Univision, he is showing that entrepreneurial skills and taste-making instincts can succeed on a big scale - and he's doing it with his own money, plus the vast sums of private equity floating around right now.
"This is the story of big-time entrepreneurship," says Jonathan Nelson, managing partner at Providence Equity Partners, which invested in ProSieben with Saban and now is a member of the Univision consortium. "There isn't one model for corporate success anymore. Haim offers a more interesting and human model." Nelson is a seasoned media and telecom investor - his portfolio includes MGM and Warner Music - and he certainly doesn't need access to Saban's capital. Still, Nelson says Saban, with his ability to spot big media opportunities, was the first person he called when Providence was checking out Univision.
Saban's ability to seamlessly glide from East Coast bankers to Israeli pols to Hollywood media moguls can be traced to his peripatetic youth. His father was a toy seller - a child can't imagine a better job for a parent - and the close-knit Jewish family lived modestly in Alexandria, Egypt. When Saban was 12, the Suez Crisis of 1956 erupted, forcing the family out of Egypt to Israel by way of Greece.
They left behind everything, and times were so bad, says Saban's wife, Cheryl, that his mother couldn't even rustle up two pans so that she could bake him a cake to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The experience of poverty "is so deep in the family psyche," says his wife of 20 years - they met when she took a job as his assistant and married a year later - "at some time in Haim's young life, he decided that was never going to happen to him again."
He got his start in show biz as the manager of an Israeli Beatles cover band called the Lions. He came to L.A. in 1983 and began a career as a self-described "cartoon schlepper" who built Japan's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers into Fox Kids, a programming joint venture with Rupert Murdoch that, um, morphed into a national cable network. Disney (Charts, Fortune 500) later purchased it for a stunning $5.2 billion, and Saban pocketed some $1.5 billion - money he has donated to several pet causes, including $7 million for the construction of a new Democratic National Committee headquarters building in Washington, D.C.
Saban wasn't even interested in politics until he met Bill Clinton during his first term as President. The meeting was brief, but the friendship grew as Clinton made dozens of trips to California during his presidency. Clinton, Saban says, ignited his interest in using his resources to find solutions to strife in the Middle East. He soon became the Democratic Party's largest single donor. "I don't say this lightly," says Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee at the time. "Haim Saban saved the Democratic Party."
Now Saban is turning his energies to Hillary Clinton. "I think he likes her better than he likes me," jokes Bill Clinton. But as he talks about Saban's support of Senator Clinton, the former President turns serious. "It is something that" - he pauses - "I can hardly talk about it because it really makes me emotional, 'cause he has genuinely come to love and respect her."
Under current campaign-finance laws, donors can give only $2,300 to a candidate's primary run and another $2,300 for the presidential run. That means that to raise the big money, fundraisers like Saban have to knock on a lot of doors. "He makes all those miserable calls you have to make to get your friends to contribute," says Steven Rattner, managing principal of New York-based investment firm Quadrangle and an active Democrat. "He's quite relentless."
For Senator Clinton's run, he has hosted events at his office and at his Beverly Park estate, a sprawling mansion in a gated community that is also home to Reba McEntire, Rod Stewart, Sylvester Stallone, Denzel Washington, and Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone. Saban, Steven Spielberg, and News Corp. (Charts, Fortune 500) executive Peter Chernin are hosting another fundraiser for Clinton in late May.
He tells of traveling with her on his jet (she paid her way, he insists) when the pilot informed him an engine had gone out. Saban says he excitedly conveyed this information to Clinton, who thanked him and went back to her reading. He later asked her how she managed to stay so calm. According to Saban, Clinton explained that she was in the middle of a good paragraph in her book and that there was little she could do about the situation, so why freak out? "This is magnificent!" Saban practically shouts. "This is what you want in a leader. Nobody touches her. She's really the most qualified candidate."
Some of the Clintons' former supporters disagree, most notably fellow mogul and master fundraiser David Geffen, who is backing Barack Obama. (He has also made a contribution to former Senator John Edwards's campaign.) The same week Geffen threw a star-studded fundraiser for the Illinois Senator, he trashed the Clintons, essentially calling them liars, in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Saban's response is uncharacteristically subdued. "I'll make three observations," he says crisply. "David is a friend of mine. David is a very smart guy. I don't understand where he's coming from. But let's you and I agree that there are other aspects of this race that are interesting beyond what David Geffen is saying."
Perhaps he's being polite, or maybe he's trying to stop himself from gloating: Clinton is running only slightly ahead of Obama in money from lawyers, and she's trailing in donations from teachers, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. In the entertainment industry, though, she's outgunning her rival by about 22%. Much of that can be attributed to Saban, who by early May had raised $1 million for Clinton, the most by any individual fundraiser. Call it the Haim effect.
Will the Haim effect also work its magic on Univision? "I would like to stress that I am the smallest investor in Univision. Every deal needs a face," he says. (When the choice is one of four private-equity firms or Saban, the guy who wrote the music for Inspector Gadget, can you blame the press for picking Saban?) Indeed, the other investors each put up about $1 billion of the capital for the deal, with Saban kicking in about $300 million of his own money. The group borrowed the rest.
But Saban's charm could also be a valuable asset to Univision in its efforts to smooth relations with Televisa, run by Mexico's powerful Azcárraga family. The late Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, a billionaire known as El Tigre, not only invested in Univision but also supplied it with Televisa's popular (and occasionally risqué) telenovelas. His son, current Televisa CEO Emilio Azcárraga Jean, sat on the Univision board for several years until he abruptly quit in May 2005. The relationship between the companies deteriorated from there, and Televisa sued Univision, saying it wasn't getting the royalties it deserved for its programming. "I know both sides" of that conflict, says Murdoch. "I would say it is very, very difficult, but if there's anyone who can mend that fence, it would be Haim."
As it turns out, Saban is already trying to make nice with Televisa. For starters, he has an existing relationship with the Mexican broadcaster, which aired his kids' programs in the 1990s. He also speaks Spanish. But mostly Saban brings to the table what business school professors might blandly call "people skills," though in Saban's hands the delivery is anything but bland.
During a visit to Televisa before the deal closed, for example, Saban and associate Adam Chesnoff toured a school the company runs for teaching the art of producing telenovelas. The two men watched a taping, and between scenes Saban danced on the set with a dozen actresses. Talk about breaking the ice. Perhaps next time he'll offer them a cucumber.
From the May 14, 2007 issue
Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/14/100009182/index.htm
SAVE THIS | EMAIL THIS | Close
Check the box to include the list of links referenced in the article.
© 2007 Cable News Network LP, LLLP.
Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story.
Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games.
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