This
Financial Times profile of Jane Harman, the former congresswoman who is CEO of the Woodrow Wilson Int’l Center, doesn’t mention Israel, but there’s a lot about her wealth: her marriage to the late inventor Sidney Harman, her jaw-dropping house in Washington, her Barcelona chair, the picture of her late husband with Bill Clinton.
This glimpse into the Jewish establishment describes Harman as the “owner” of Newsweek/The Daily Beast.
I ask about a sculpture on the coffee table, of a man on a bench. “It was an award for Sidney in honour of [financier] Bernard Baruch,” says Harman, who took over as owner of Newsweek/Daily Beast after her husband’s death.
Well this is confusing. Newsweek/Daily Beast was co-owned by Barry Diller and Harman’s late husband. Sidney Harman died in April 2011 at 92. This obit in the Times said that his estate was assuming his ownership share, but no individual was named.
Soon after that, Adweek said that Jane Harman was taking her late husband’s place on the board. And Adweek raised questions about her editorial influence as a political actor over the magazine and website.
Interestingly, Sidney Harman once said he wasn’t leaving the magazine to his wife.
The Washington Post from 2010, Jeff Stein reporting (emphasis mine):
Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old technology titan who recently bought Newsweek from The Washington Post Co., says the future leadership of the weekly could include his children, throwing cold water on speculation that his wife, Jane, the chairman of an important congressional intelligence committee, will leave Capitol Hill to run it…
Responding to an unstated question about his age, the nonagenarian said, “I am obliged to develop a succession plan early — and I will.”
It will not include Jane, he added emphatically Monday.
“She will have no role — none at all — at Newsweek,” he said…
Liberal bloggers have been stirred up by Harman’s purchase of Newsweek, particularly by the prospect that his wife, the veteran Californian Democrat who chairs the House homeland security subcommittee on intelligence, would play an influential role at the magazine.
This confusion is intriguing, of course, because Harman is such a foreign policy hawk and darling of the Israel lobby.
Just a few weeks ago she rushed to the side of Obama assassination czar John Brennan and
stifled Medea Benjamin at the Wilson Center.
When she was in Congress, representing a California district, she was
famously wiretapped talking to an unnamed Israeli, doing some lobby horse-trading for her own advancement, and evidently involving Haim Saban, the inventor of Power Rangers who is an ardent funder of pro-Israel causes.
One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the
National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel [AIPAC] lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials say…
In return, the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor — the media mogul
Haim Saban — would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative
Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post.
Wow. I didn’t know that Haim Saban was a media mogul either!
Great reporting – thanks Phil!
So perhaps we can all start speaking with Peter Beinart about the financial support that his blog gets from Newsweek. Certainly a conflict of interests there.
I’ve said it before and I still don’t understand why folks don’t suspect Israeli involvement in things such as facilitating Ms. Harman to buy Newsweek. Obviously this kind of thing is well within Israel’s ambit of permissibility, so you look at different people in different countries and identify those who are zealously loyal to Israel and you give them a boost up when you can so they give you your hopefully greater, more systemic boosts down the line.
Always struck me how Saban, of all people, got the gambling concession in Macao from the Chinese gov’t, and I simply didn’t believe that of the original nine or so billionaire oligarchs who popped up so quick in Russia that something like 6 or 7 of them just happened to be jewish. The statistics for something like that are just too mind-boggling, and indeed when this or that one got in some trouble and had to skedaddle if I recall correct the place they skedaddled to was of course Israel.
Like I say, it clearly isn’t something that Israel would consider out of bounds, we know they use “sayanim” or whatever from Ostrovsky’s book so why shouldn’t they help *create* them, and of course it’s a smart idea, and rather totally in keeping with the intense tribal philosophy of zionist jews, right?
RE: “I didn’t know that Haim Saban was a media mogul
either!” ~ Weiss
FROM WIKIPEDIA [Haim Saban]: Haim Saban (Hebrew: חיים סבן) (born 15 October 1944) is an Egyptian born Israeli-American television and media proprietor.[2] With an estimated current net worth of $3.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 104th richest person in America.[1] . . .
. . . Media career
• Saban Entertainment
In the United States, he became a television producer, founding Saban Entertainment in 1988.[12] During that time, Haim Saban and partner Shuki Levy became known for soundtrack compositions for children’s television programs of the 1980s. Although Levy and Saban composed for their own properties (such as Kidd Video and Maple Town), they scored for other production companies as well (such as Inspector Gadget, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, M.A.S.K., Dinosaucers, Dragon Quest, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors). In 1998, The Hollywood Reporter reported that he did not actually compose all the music (totalling 3,700 works in 2008) he is credited for; ten composers threatened to sue and Saban settled out of court.[13]
In the 1990s, Saban’s company became best known for the production of Power Rangers, Masked Rider, VR Troopers and Big Bad Beetleborgs, which were Western adaptations of Japanese tokusatsu shows.
• ABC Family
On July 23, 2001, Saban announced that he and News Corporation would sell Fox Family Worldwide Inc for $5.3 billion to The Walt Disney Company.[14] and on October 24, 2001, the sale was completed[12] and the network was renamed ABC Family.[5] Saban profited about $1.6 billion from this sale.[5]
• ProSiebenSat.1
In August 2003, Saban led a consortium, which acquired a controling stake in the straggling ProSiebenSat.1 Media group from the Kirch Media Group, the then-bankrupt German media conglomerate.[15]
ProSiebenSat.1, is Germany’s largest commercial television broadcasting company, which owns five German TV channels, including ProSieben and SAT.1, two of the top three stations in Germany. Collectively, ProSiebenSat.1’s channels represented approximately 45% of the German TV advertising market at the time. Saban’s ProSiebenSat.1 acquisition was the first time a foreigner took control of a significant German Media company.[5]
Saban oversaw a successful business turnaround of ProSiebenSat.1, recruiting former business rivals, ex-BSkyB chief executive Tony Ball and former BBC Director General Greg Dyke to the board of the company.[16]
In March 2007, Saban Capital Group and the consortium sold its controlling interest in ProSiebenSat.1 to KKR and Permira, for 22.40 euros a share after originally paying 7.5 euros per share in 2003.[17]
• Univision
On June 27, 2006, Saban Capital Group led a group of investors bidding for Univision Communications, the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States.[18][19] Other investors in the Saban-led group were Texas Pacific Group of Fort Worth, Texas and Thomas H. Lee Partners. The group was successful in acquiring Univision with a bid valued at $13.7 billion (USD).[18][20] . . . SOURCE – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Saban
Yet another fabulously wealthy and very influential citizen whose primary loyalty is to the state of Israel.
It’s a wonder we’ve achieved anything at all for the Palestinians when you get a glimpse of the forces aligned against them.
Saban: Buy media outlets to protect Israel. Jane Harman no doubt agrees.
“He remains keenly interested in the world of business, but he is most proud of his role as political power broker. His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.
At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula.His “three ways to be influential in American politics,” he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets. In 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/10/100510fa_fact_bruck?currentPage=all
“He and his private-equity partners acquired Univision in 2007”
Univision goes neoconservative
The Spanish-language TV network recently aired a saber-rattling report on Iran, focussing on its ties to Latin America.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/201221584750141923.html