Miami Herald apologizes for anti-Semitic insert that compared Black Lives Matter to Nazis

Editors of the sister paper of the Miami Herald apologized this week after the publication ran an insert that included a column comparing supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement to Nazis.

The column also included anti-Semitic material, at one point asking “what kind of people are these Jews?” and mocking Jewish people for “always talking about the Holocaust.”

The paper is investigating how the “LIBRE” insert in the Nuevo Herald, a Spanish-language publication owned by the Miami Herald Company, ended up being run. Management of the paper also said they would never run LIBRE again. 

“We are deeply sorry that inflammatory, racist and anti-Semitic commentary reached our el Nuevo Herald subscribers through LIBRE, a Spanish-language publication that paid our company to have the product printed and inserted into our print edition as a weekly supplement,” Aminda Marqués González, the Herald and el Nuevo Herald’s executive editor and publisher, and el Nuevo Herald managing editor Nancy San Martín wrote in a letter to readers.

The letter said no one in the paper’s leadership had read the insert before it was run.

“The fact that no one in leadership, beginning with us, had previously read this advertising insert until this issue was surfaced by a reader is distressing. It is one of a series of internal failures that we are investigating in order to prevent this from ever recurring,” the two wrote.

The column by Roberto Luque Escalona included offensive remarks about Jewish people and argued that the Black Lives Matter movement involved theft while the Nazis “only destroyed.”

“What kind of people are these Jews? They’re always talking about the Holocaust, but have they already forgotten Kristallnacht, when Nazi thugs rampaged through Jewish shops all over Germany? So do the BLM and antifa, only the Nazis didn’t steal; they only destroyed,” Escalona wrote. 

The insert met with a furious blowback from Herald readers, some of whom questioned how it was possible it got through editorial controls. 

The Herald’s leadership said it was in the process of investigating its business relationship with LIBRE. The open letter to readers said they only learned of the offensive column after a reader pointed it out.

“In addition, we are reviewing all inserts and our processes for these paid supplements that the company has printed and distributed with our news product. Our initial investigation has found that we do not have a content review process for LIBRE and other similar supplements that are curated by paid customers,” the two editors wrote.

“In the interest of transparency in our community, we will share our findings of the LIBRE review in a story that will be published in both Spanish and English by the end of the week,” they added.