Moshe Nussbaum lost his voice to ALS, so he wrote his way back on air
Tel Aviv, Israel · Moshe Nussbaum, Liron Dahan
Published August 10, 2026
For forty years he was the voice Israelis heard when something bad happened. When ALS took it, he and his newsroom trained a model on his own archive, and he went back to writing the news himself.
The story
The person and the place
Moshe Nussbaum, 71, "Nussi" to generations of viewers, has covered crime and national security for Channel 12 News in Tel Aviv since the channel signed on in 1993.
The problem Moshe cared about
ALS came for his speech. He kept reporting as long as he could, then the appearances thinned out and stopped. The job was still in him. The voice that delivered it was going.
The agency moment
Forty years of broadcasts were sitting in the station's archive, which meant thousands of hours of him talking. Channel 12's own engineers, led by Liron Dahan, trained a model on it. Nussbaum kept the part of the work the disease could not reach. He reports the story, he writes every word, and the model says it in his cadence.
What changed
Channel 12 aired a preview in January 2025 that put his real, halting speech next to the restored voice. Two months later a Haaretz television critic sat down and reviewed an actual Nussbaum report, on a story about the prime minister, the way critics review anyone. He was back on the air, not every night, but genuinely back. He was also the first to name what the tool could do in worse hands, telling AP he worries how easily voices like his could be used to spread falsehoods. And he was plain about its limits: it cannot go live, so the field reporting he loved most is not coming back.
The move worth copying
He did not argue about everything he had lost. He found the piece of the job that never needed his voice, the reporting and the writing, and rebuilt the rest around it. If you know someone being quietly written off at work, this is the one to send them.
"The fact that Channel 12 and my news managers are allowing me to reinvent myself anew, that is one of the most important medicines I can get in my fight with this disease." — Moshe Nussbaum, Associated Press
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified August 10, 2026.