Unable to pull clear of his main opposition rival as the Israeli election campaign moves into its final stages, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, is biting the hand that used to feed him: the media.
One of Mr Netanyahu's clearest successes in the 1996 election campaign was the way he outperformed Mr Shimon Peres in newspaper interviews, on the radio and, above all, on television; in the only TV debate of that campaign, held shortly before polling day, the younger, more focused, more energetic Mr Netanyahu struck an impressive contrast to the elderly, tired, Mr Peres.
Now, though, Mr Netanyahu has turned on the media, asserting that it treats him and others on the political right unfairly, branding the majority of Israeli journalists "leftists", and accusing them of behaving like foot-soldiers fighting for the Labour opposition leader, Mr Ehud Barak.
The prime minister's regular assaults on the "media leftists" are enthusiastically received at rallies for his Likud Party. At one recent gathering, he reportedly pointed to an Israel Television camera crew and inquired sarcastically: "Are you here from Labour TV?" Earlier this week, he declared flatly that "most media folk are working for Barak".
Mr Netanyahu has certainly had a rough media ride since that 1996 campaign victory. State television uncovered a plot to install a Likud party crony to the vaunted position of government attorney-general - a scandal that almost cost Mr Netanyahu his job. Another media-exposed scandal is now enveloping his justice minister.
One of his closest political allies, Rabbi Aryeh Deri of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted two weeks in a bribery scandal that grew out of a newspaper expose. Mr Netanyahu's wife, Sara, meanwhile, has continually made headlines as a purported control freak.
But Mr Barak and Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, the third main candidate for prime minister, have also been mercilessly scrutinised by the state and commercial TV news shows and the privately-owned tabloid dailies. Allegations that Mr Barak, when he was army chief of staff in 1992, abandoned wounded soldiers after a training accident, were sensationally reported by the top-selling daily Yediot Ahronot.
Although a recent official report cleared Mr Barak, he was badly stained by the episode. Mr Mordechai, for his part, is routinely mocked for heading a party of political has-beens, with no common ideology, its policies shaped by opinion polls.
Radio, TV and the print media here purport to strive for objective coverage, and the two main tabloids are not identified with any party. They would risk losing a large chunk of their readership if they were blatantly pro-Barak or pro-Netanyahu. While there may be a tendency to clear front-page space for a left-wing analyst's views more often than for a right-winger's, Mr Netanyahu's depiction of the media concertedly pushing Mr Barak to victory is plainly exaggerated.
His verbal assaults most likely stem from frustration at his failure, thus far, to close the three or four percent lead that Mr Barak holds over him in surveys ahead of the May 17th election.
But the only effect they have had so far is to prompt the National Federation of Israeli Journalists to demand an apology from him, for denigrating the media and "thus encouraging violence [against journalists] by extremists."