With pretentious and obscure rhetoric, Spain's ABC dresses up anti-Western sentiment and Jew-hatred as "culture." Martín-Miguel Rubio Esteban draws from an ancient religious hatred to whip up a more modern nationalistic bigotry.
EFE's and RTVE's preoccupation with defending themselves against false accusations of passing off old Kabul images as current scenes from Iran detracted from justified criticism of instances in which the mainstream Spanish news outlets provided less than rigorous reporting.
CAMERA Español's critical review of El País coverage since Oct. 7 reveals that the problem with the paper runs far deeper than what was corrected under pressure.
The repeated association of “the Jews” with suspicion, violence or collective guilt suggests an editorial pattern, not technical mistakes. In the latest blunder, El País falsely links Barcelona's targeted Jewish community to Gaza "genocide."
Following an uproar, El País editors quietly removed reporting that U.S. Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein “has made efforts to maintain an impartial stance despite being a well-known member of the Jewish community.”
Following correspondence from CAMERA Español, Spain's publicly-funded RTVE removed an Instagram post which falsely claimed that Israel passed a law enabling the “death penalty for Palestinians.”
Spain's publicly funded RTVE reveals a troubling pattern in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war: ideological activism disguised as journalism, the systematic omission of Israeli suffering and the normalization of terms like “genocide” without legal or factual grounding.
When Israel’s extremist critics start arguing by analogy, you can be pretty sure it’s because they don’t have any facts, evidence or logic to support their position. Their use of the Ukrainian crisis to castigate Israel is a case in point.
El País, the largest and most influential newspaper in the Spanish world, has a long history of biased reporting about the Jewish state and the Arab-Israeli conflict. For several years since 2009, the newspaper's coverage was somewhat more balanced and objective. But it seems, over the past year, to be drifting back to its previous anti-Israel reporting and its opinion pages have become a forum for anti-Israel activists.
