The Eurovision Audience the New York Times Couldn’t See |
Spain gave Israel 33 percent of its public vote at Eurovision 2025, in a country whose public opinion is deeply hostile to the Israeli government. The New York Times investigation published on May 11 treats this result as suspicious enough to require explanation, and offers one: a coordinated Israeli government influence campaign.
The explanation only works if you accept something the investigation never quite says out loud, that the audience is incapable of holding more than one thought at once, that its vote must collapse into its stated political opinions, and that any result which fails to do so is evidence of foreign manipulation rather than of an audience the investigation refused to imagine.
The piece is meticulous about budgets, bureaucracies, and meeting minutes. It documents real things, the foreign ministry’s advertising spend, the prime minister’s social media graphics, the diplomatic pressure on European broadcasters, the contortions of Eurovision’s governing body trying to avoid an internal vote. These are genuine findings.
But the analysis that surrounds those findings rests on a particular theory of what audiences are and what voting is. A vote in a song contest, the investigation assumes, is a political instrument. A person who opposes Israeli government policy should, as a matter of course, also vote against the Israeli singer. If such an audience nevertheless votes for her, the explanation must be technological, financial, or coordinated. Not........