TEL AVIV —  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.

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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."

And like Fox, the paper has positioned itself against a mainstream media its editors cast as elitist and out of touch. Another of the five principles is "to remember that we are Israelis."

The paper's foreign editor, Boaz Bismuth, a former Israeli ambassador to Mauritania and longtime Paris correspondent for Yediot Aharonot — the new paper's main target and rival — embraces the comparison.

"Fox is proud to be American, but what is nice about America is that ABC and CBS and NBC are no less proud to be American," he said in an interview at the paper's quiet, humming Tel Aviv newsroom, leaving unstated the suggestion that Israel Hayom's rivals are not so proud.

"It doesn't mean that if sometimes Israel is right that I work for the government," said Bismuth, who offered an example of the new paper's posture: "If there are rumors about the bad conduct of a soldier, it won't immediately be our main headline."

Israel Hayom takes as its premise that out-of-touch mainstream media are the country's real power.

"They try to portray my newspaper as the real ruler of Israel, not Netanyahu," said Nahum Barnea, the top columnist at Yediot Aharonot, labeling the charge "ridiculous."

The media tracking firm TGI reported this summer that Israel Hayom has risen to a rough tie with Yediot, with each reaching about a third of the reading public. The paper's rise has occasioned a serious newspaper war, with Yediot — which is not free — stepping up its efforts to distribute free copies to train riders and other readers.

And while its rivals grit their teeth, the paper has been welcomed by Netanyahu's circle.

"It's made a big difference in the country," said Netanyahu's closest adviser, Ron Dermer.

Dermer said it remains a missed opportunity that none of the country's television stations have followed the same "Fox model" of "chang[ing] the editorial line."