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MADRID — State media in the Old Continent and across the English Channel in the United Kingdom are as woke as the formerly public media in the United States. But despite two recent high-profile embarrassments, it’s doubtful state media will get what they really deserve — namely, to be defunded, as NPR and PBS were.
Both cases have U.S. relevance and, of course, the bias that led to the controversies was to the left. This begs the question: Why should European conservatives continue to fund it?
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In a nutshell, here’s what happened. In the U.K., the British Broadcasting Corporation was caught splicing together different parts of an address that President Donald Trump gave to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to make it appear as if he urged the crowd to attack the Capitol.
The dust has not yet settled, but BBC Director General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness both resigned. The BBC also apologized to Trump. But this did not calm matters, as the president said he plans to sue.
In Spain, in what has now become a cause célèbre, leftist TV anchorman Xabier Fortes spent 22 agonizing minutes trying to get a Mexican historian to agree that Spain’s conquest of what later became Mexico was a cruel and bloody affair to justify the fact that Spain’s socialist-communist ruling coalition, Fortes’s paymasters, recently issued an abject apology to Mexico.
It was agonizing because the historian, Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, an eminent expert on what was once known as the viceroyalty of New Spain, patiently explained to a frustrated Fortes that, no, actually, all the great things in Mexico, and indeed the country of Mexico itself, were Spain’s creation.
“Everything we Mexicans like about Mexico starts in 1521,” Zunzunegui said, naming the year Mexico fell to the Spaniards.
Zunzunegui further explained that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded, and obtained, an apology from Madrid only to deflect attention from her links to drug cartels, which now run parts of Mexico. And just to underscore his point, thousands of protesters encircled Sheinbaum’s palace on Nov. 15 to protest her narco state.
Americans know the BBC controversy better because it deals directly with our president. But they are also more familiar with it because news in and on the U.K. is in English and more readily picked up by our journalists, who love to virtue signal their “multiculturalism” but rarely speak a foreign language.
But the Spanish story also has major U.S. significance. The Smithsonian plans to add a National Museum of the American Latino to its other 21 woke museums, and the leaders of this prospective museum, along with the exhibitions we have seen so far, make clear that whatever it puts on display will follow Sheinbaum’s playbook on anticolonial animus.
This should not come as a surprise, as key figures involved in the Latino museum either do communications work for Sheinbaum’s Mexico or are reported in the Mexican press as trying to sell access to Trump to Mexican businesses.
Let’s start with the BBC mess. In October 2024, just a week before the last U.S. presidential election, the BBC’s investigative documentary program Panorama aired a segment that spliced together remarks Trump said an hour apart in the speech he delivered to the Jan. 6 crowd.
The intent was to make it appear as if Trump pushed the crowd to storm the Capitol. Here’s how bad it was: In reality, Trump told his supporters, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” An hour later, he said, “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, Panorama stitched the tape to make Trump say, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
It was Britain’s Daily Telegraph, a highly regarded conservative broadsheet, that broke the story on Nov. 3 after being privy to an internal BBC memo shown to the paper by a whistleblower. The memo detailed how the “corporation edited footage in Panorama program to make it seem president was encouraging [the] Capitol riot.”
A BBC spokesman revealed last week that “BBC chair Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president’s speech.”
At the same time, the corporation and its lawyers are also engaging in some rapid “CYA.” The spokesman added, “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
Trump does not exactly see things this way and said he intends to take legal action.
“I think I have to do it,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday. “They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”
Trump said U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer reached out and requested a conversation, and that he intended to call him.
All Britons who own a working TV set pay a “license fee” that funds the BBC, even if they use it to watch other channels or simply to play video games and never watch a single minute of BBC programming.
“It is not an innocuous tax,” the Spectator‘s Kate Andrews wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday. “It targets the poor, who receive letters threatening fines and imprisonment if they don’t pay and update their license yearly.”
According to Andrews, fee violations account for 12% of female prosecutions in Britain.
And on Saturday, the Telegraph conducted another investigative look into the BBC, this time based on a different dossier compiled by the group Transgender Trend. The report revealed a consistent pattern of the BBC “peddling pro-trans agenda to youngsters.”
In the U.S., we finally put funding for NPR and PBS behind us, making them “public” no more. But these two broadcasters, and other minor entities that used to get funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, are small, almost luxury outlets that catered to a tiny portion of American elites. Not so with the BBC, which reaches around 80% of the U.K. public.
By contrast, Fortes’s Radiotelevisión Española is watched by about half of Spaniards. However, its cultural importance extends beyond its 54% audience share. This is what made Fortes’s argument with Zunzunegui such an important event.
The interview took place on Nov. 4, five days after José Manuel Albares, foreign minister for Spain’s far-left government, practically the last leftist government in continental Europe, and the only one that includes communists, issued an apology for the supposed “suffering and injustice” caused during the conquest of Mexico.
“There was injustice, and it is merely right and fair to acknowledge and deplore this. It is part of our joint history,” Albares said as he opened an exhibition of indigenous Mexican art in Madrid. “We can neither deny it nor forget it.”
It was the apology long sought by Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
But Zunzunegui told the fumbling Fortes, “There is nothing to apologize for.”
“The most beautiful cities in our country all belonged to the Viceroyalty: Mexico’s big cities, all of which have their cathedral, their aqueduct, their hospital, their baroque buildings, their altarpieces covered with gold — because the gold was not hauled away, it remained there,” he said. “A complete civilization was built.”
At one point, Fortes riposted, “Well, my man, they came with swords. I mean, here our migrants come with backpacks looking for a living, but there Hernán Cortés did not arrive in an NGO plan,” referring to the Spaniard who led the conquest.
But as Zunzunegui explained, Cortés had the support of the vast majority of tribes, who were subjected to a real genocide by the Mexica, the name the Aztecs used for themselves.
“Cortés forged alliances with the tlaxcaltecas, the totonacas, the cholultecas, the huejotzincas,” Zunzunegui lectured his host. “All these peoples hated the Mexicas, because by the time Hernán Cortés arrived, the Mexicas were extracting some 20,000 hearts a year and eating them afterward,” referencing the Mexica’s lust for human sacrifice.
Fortes allowed that, yes, the Mexica were “a civilization very different from Europe’s.”
Fortes defended Albares’s apology as “careful diplomatic language.” But Zunzunegui warned that Sheinbaum will never be placated because “that woman relishes having public enemies.”
Yet it is Sheinbaum’s anti-Western views that will be reflected in our “national” Latino museum, whose Friends of the Nat’l Museum of the American Latino lobbying group signed a partnership with the Mexican government to promote Mexico and its film industry.
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“These stories are just a few of the many stories we hope will one day fill the halls of a future National Museum of the American Latino on our National Mall,” the group said in an X post earlier this year.
All this anti-Western bile is paid for by Western taxpayers, whether here, in Spain, or in Britain. Mexicans seem increasingly fed up with Sheinbaum’s antics, but until we make public entities such as media and museums accountable, expect nothing to change.
