Country Iran | Availability Worldwide | |
 | ||
Type Cable television network Slogan Nexo Latino
(Latino Connection) Owner Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting Key people Ali Ejarehdar, Director-General | ||
HispanTV (Spanish: [ispanˈteuβe, ihpanˈteuβe], Persian (patterned from Spanish pronunciation): [ispanˈteube, ispanˈteuve], Persian alphabet: هیسپانتیوی) is a Spanish language news channel operated by IRIB, Iran's state-owned public broadcasting corporation. It began broadcasting in December 2011.
Contents
HispanTV's programming has been distributed in Venezuela, Spain, Argentina, Cuba and other countries worldwide and is intended to reinforce ties between Iran and Latin American states such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Mexico as well as to counter what the Iranian government sees as unfair coverage in Western media. The channel is similar to Press TV, an English language news channel and Al-Alam an Arabic satellite TV station also owned by the Iranian state, which claim to provide "accurate and unbiased coverage of the world and the Middle East events as they unfold."
HispanTV has foreign journalists from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, USA, Chile, Nicaragua and Venezuela. It also has journalists from Iran who speak Spanish.
Goals
The primary goal of HispanTV is to provide a complete platform of multimedia services to the Spanish speaking peoples of Latin America, Latin-American citizens of Iranian origin, Hispanic and Latino Americans of the United States, Muslim minorities of the Hispanophone world, and Spanish-speaking foreign residents in Iran, offering an opportunity for cultural exchange through television and web broadcasts.
Sanctions
In July 2013, HispanTV and other Iranian channels were removed from several European and American satellites, allegedly because of the Iran sanctions, even though an EU spokesman said that these sanctions do not apply to media. HispanTV is no longer aired in Spain as Spain is a member of the EU and HispanTV now exclusively broadcasts in Hispanic America. As of 2015, the channel has only resumed broadcasting in the Community of Madrid through the channels 45 and 57 UHF DTT. HispanTV has also "tried to bypass sanctions by providing live feeds of its networks through YouTube".
Antisemitism allegations
The Anti-Defamation League has claimed that "HispanTV regularly broadcasts anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories" and that Iran's "influence in Latin America has been a strong feature of the Iranian government’s foreign policy in the last decade, and HispanTV serves as a platform to spread Tehran’s conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism".
In their Antisemitism in Venezuela 2013 report, the Venezuelan Confederation of Israelite Associations (CAIV) claims that HispanTV engages in anti-Israel news coverage and that these biased reports are then repeated by Russia's RT News and Cuba's Prensa Latina, and Venezuela’s state media, including SIBCI, AVN, TeleSUR, Venezolana de Televisión (VTV), Alba TV, La Radio del Sur, Radio Nacional de Venezuela (RNV), YVKE Mundial, Correo del Orinoco and Ciudad CCS.