Ben Smith has the story:
Las Vegas gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson is a significant figure in Republican politics the 13th richest man in America and one of the GOP's biggest donors. But he's an even bigger player in Israel, where he's a key backer of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet Adelson's sharpest transformation of the political landscape may be through his ownership of Israel Hayom ("Israel Today”), a three-year-old free daily newspaper that quietly became the most widely distributed daily in the country this summer. It stirs passions strong enough that legislators have sought to hobble it with laws banning foreign ownership and selling below cost.
Adelson's paper is an assault on the media status quo in the model of Fox News in a country where newspapers still litigate the political conversation. The echoes aren't subtle: One of the five principles printed on the tabloid's dense second page translates as "fair and balanced."