Ha Shidur Ha Mefutzal - Broadcast

Broadcast

On 2 March 2002, a football match was played between Maccabi Haifa (then at the top of the Israeli Premier League) and Maccabi Kiryat Gat (then at the bottom of the same league). The Telad broadcasting company aired the game live on Israel's Channel 2. Thirty minutes into the game, Kiriat Gat was leading with a score of 3-0, in what seemed as one of the extraordinary matches for years.

Concurrently, first reports of a suicide attack in Jerusalem were beginning to arrive at the channel's news desk. Executives at Telad were faced with a dilemma about which of these events should be broadcast. Given the propensity of suicide attacks during this period (following the Second Intifada), the situation was fairly common, and normally handled by "handing off" broadcast to the Channel 2 News company. However, on this occasion Telad ultimately decided to split the screen - broadcasting the game on the rightmost third of the screen, while airing the breaking news and footage from the scene on the remaining space. The news break featured pictures of the devastated scene of the attack. The sound was shifted entirely to the news reports coming from Jerusalem. This continued for ten minutes, until the decision was made to end the broadcast of the game entirely, at which point the news report was scaled back to full-screen size.