אב"א אחימאיר משרטט את פני העיתונות העברית בתקופת המנדט

Abba Ahimeir (1897-1962) devoted a considerable part of his public activity to journalistic work. He wrote for most of the leading Hebrew newspapers including, in the 1920s, for the left-wing press, and later, from the end of the 1920s until his death,for the right-wing press.However, besides being a political activist, Ahimeir analyzed the Hebrew press from a historical and sociological point of view, studying development trends and their characteristics, and the people who shaped them. His analyses were presented in a series of articles that he published in the revisionist newspaper Ha-Mashkif in the1940s, and which continued in Herut in the 1960s.In the present article, I examine Ahimeir’s analyses of the main players that shaped the map of the Hebrew press in Palestine during the Mandate period: Haaretz, the liberal elitist newspaper edited by Moshe Glickson until 1936, and later controlled by the Schocken family; the popular Doar-Ha-Yom, a sensationalist right-wing newspaper edited by Itamar Ben-Avi; and Davar, a socialist labor union newspaper edited by Berl Katznelson.During the Mandate period. there was a long and animated conflict between the newspapers. Ahimeir emphasized that its underlying cause was socio-cultural: between Jews born in Palestine, representing the “new Hebrew generation” who were liberated from the inferiority complexes of diasporic Jews (both Ashkenazim and Sephardim), and new immigrants from Europe who represented the Old-World Jews. These groups created newspapers with different ideologies, and with a different format and discourse structure. The native-born generation launched a popular,commercial sensationalist press, represented by the daily Doar-Ha-Yom, while the new immigrants rejected “yellow journalism,” preferring a “responsible,” “honest,”and “serious” press via, on the one hand, the elitist commercial Haaretz and, on the other, the socialist party organ Davar.