Mayor Moshe Abutbol of Bet Shemesh chose to hit back at the 2 main newspapers that have been leading the "attack" against him with articles incessantly lambasting him.

He published statements in Chadash, his newspaper of choice, hitting back. In his statement, he attacks the newspapers (Keren Or and Shopping Bet Shemesh) saying they have shown themselves to have broken the basic laws of journalism and have lost their objectivity. A newspaper is meant to be objective, so he says, in its reporting, and in its parshanut as well, though in parshanut there is more leeway. These newspapers have gone beyond the objective and have clearly showed their political affiliation and report and analyze the news with no objectivity.

It is ironic that he chose to publish this in Chadash. Chadash too is a newspaper with zero objectivity and completely adheres to political affiliation. It happens to be that right now Chadash is in line with the mayor, so they do not attack him. However, in the years before Abutbol was mayor, the Chadash paper attacked Vaknin whenever it felt it was prudent to do so. The Chadash is a clearly affiliated newspaper pulling a very sibjective style of reporting, yet that is the platform used to attack other papers for their lack of objectivity.

I don't know how objective any given newspaper is really meant to be (I did not study journalism and do not know the "rules"). I do know that in pretty much every newspaper in the world you will easily be able to figure out the affiliation of the newspaper after reading just a few articles.

Abutbol's response was poorly placed, considering the content of his response. And I am not so sure how accurate his claims are regarding what the newspapers are meant to be doing.

(That being said, Keren Or has repeatedly attacked the mayor and the haredim in ways that are way beyond reason, but that does not affect how the mayor chose to respond in poor taste)