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Late last month, at a rally in a public park in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, made his views on journalists explicit. “Corrupt journalists, bribed journalists,” he shouted. He pointed at the crowd, who were waving flags and cheering, and continued: “They are the ones showing the reality that you [journalists] never let be seen because you had a monopoly on the microphones.”
It was not Milei’s first attack on journalism since he took office, last December, but it did represent an escalation of a view that he has long promoted—that journalists are part of a “caste” of people historically close to power who are to blame for Argentina’s recurring economic crises.
FOPEA, a nonprofit that monitors attacks on journalists, reported that out of every recorded attack on journalists—mostly rhetorical—between April 18 and July 17, almost one-third involved the president.
On July 15, for example, Milei directly insulted Sofía Diamante, an economic journalist at La Nación, a newspaper with one of the largest audiences in Argentina. “Throughout my campaign, she spent the entire time lying about my proposals,” he wrote on X. “The directors of La Nación told me they trusted my work and gave me the freedom to keep doing my job as always,” Diamante says. The president’s attacks on her work haven’t proved to be a significant obstacle to her reporting so far. Although Milei stopped answering her questions (as did Luis Caputo, Argentina’s minister of the economy), other officials in his government still do. “I am surprised about the degree of violence he has reached, though,” she says.
Alejandro Alfie, a journalist at Clarín (another of Argentina’s most prominent newspapers) covering media, journalism, and freedom of speech, wrote a story about Milei’s hostility toward journalists during August. He found thirty-seven direct attacks on individual journalists. He himself has been a victim of online harassment (including retweets by the president of posts criticizing him). “Last month, I blocked two hundred X accounts that would harass me daily. Many were verified accounts, although they had very few followers. These weren’t X users. These were orchestrated trolls,” Alfie says.
“He aligns with Trump and [Brazil’s former right-wing president Jair] Bolsonaro in the constant and emphatic targeting of the press as an enemy,” said Daniel Dessein, president of the Press Freedom Commission of the Argentine Journalism Entities Association (Adepa). “He also aligns with them in defending social media as the great platform for promoting freedom of expression, in contrast to the press.”
As Milei approaches one year in office, his rhetoric against journalists has steadily been expressed in the form of policy. Austerity measures have included closing Telam, the state-owned news agency, and halting the government advertising that had been a main source of income for Argentine media companies and a politically controversial topic.
Previous administrations were accused of using that state advertising to benefit politically aligned media and punish others. But Milei takes a broader view—in his inaugural speech, in December, he announced his decision to spend zero pesos on it in 2024.
That isn’t quite a promise he’s been able to keep: the new regulation does not apply to public companies like YPF, the state-owned oil company, and Aerolíneas Argentinas, an airline. But the companies do not publish data on how much they are spending, and they reject journalists’ public information requests (similar to FOIAs) about it. So we don’t precisely know.
That too is part of a broader Milei policy. Since 2016, Argentine journalists have had the legal right to access documents related to government officials and state affairs. But a new federal decree has modified that regulation and limits journalists’ ability to file public information requests by broadening the reasons information can be classified as “secret” and thus denied to those requesting it.
Although other administrations have held public and heated political wars against media companies (most notably, the governments of Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner), Milei’s style of persecution feels different.
“That [the Kirchners’ period] was aimed at destroying some media companies. This is aimed at journalism. Milei doesn’t believe in journalism’s role,” Alfie says.
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