Demonizing Israel in Spain

Monica Cooper slams lacking, biased news reporting by leading Spanish daily El Pais


Monica Cooper
Opinion/Ynet
14 March '10

Monica Cooper is the Director of ReVista de Medio Oriente, the Spanish outlet of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

A few weeks back, the well-known author Alfonso Ussia wrote in Spain’s La Razón about a young Catalan woman picked up by Israeli police in Ramallah. Ussia relates that she was presumably campaigning against the Jewish state while holding an expired entry visa on her Spanish passport. Had she been in an Arab state doing something similar, writes Ussia, she would be - most probably - stoned to death in the public square. Instead, Ariadna Jové Martí was sent in good health back to Spain, with an airplane ticket – probably paid for by the State of Israel.

How was all this viewed in Spain? The Foreign Relations Office expressed outrage to Israel’s diplomats over the affair, while the press got busy lambasting the Jewish state. All this, as Ussia rightly points out, while ignoring or justifying every ignominy of any other country around the globe.

Are Israelis aware of the Israel-bashing and demonizing carried out in the Iberian press?

Do they know, for example, the case of Madrid’s El País? With 430,000 daily copies and an Internet readership of over two million, El País is considered the “leader of the mainstream press in Spain.” And alongside every single article about Israel on the website of this pre-eminent newspaper is a profile of Israel that lists Tel Aviv as the country’s capital.

In its section “Corresponsales” (reporters), El País explains that reporter Juan Miguel Muñoz reports from “Jerusalem, Near East.” No other reporter is identified like this as based in a geographic area; they are all in a named country (except those who report on the EU from Brussels).

ReVista de Medio Oriente, a Spanish media watchdog organization, asked El País’ editors why this different treatment of Israel. About their placement of Israel’s capital in the “Near East,” they said that Muñoz “reports from Jerusalem on Lebanon and Syria too” - hardly a convincing answer on the face of it, and even less so because the reporter almost never writes about those countries but writes practically daily on Israel. About Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, the editors told ReVista that the “directive to maintain this designation the way it is comes from the paper’s directors and can’t be changed.”

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