Saturday's edition of El Mundo will feature an interview with David Irving, touting the Holocaust denier as an "expert" on World War 2.
And according to the Jerusalem Post, the Spanish daily's using the same excuse as Aftonbladet editors: freedom of press.
Freedom of the press doesn't wash.
- How could El Mundo's editor's dismiss the fact that Irving's reputation as an "expert" was completely shredded by a British judge who called him an "anti-Semitic and racist" Holocaust denier and a "pro-Nazi polemicist" at the end of his libel trial against Deborah Lipstadt?
- Presenting "different narratives" that have no basis in reality is the stuff of Stalinist style historical revisionism, not what you'd expect of "history's first draft."
- Saying that "people can decide on their own" is not a valid defense for newspapers, whose job is to report "just the facts." How are readers to make "informed judgements" based on misinformation?
I once looked forward to Irving fading into obscurity — Deborah Lipstadt expressed such confidence in a now ironic BBC interview. But that hope was based on the assumption that people treat Irving's so-called "research" with the disdain it deserves. But I didn't account for the insanity of El Mundo.
