Javier Milei and his sister hate journalism

Press freedom suffered a significant blow in Argentina this week when a judge granted Presidential Chief-of–Staff Karina Milei a ruling ordering the media to stop publishing controversial recordings of the president’s sister. It happened a week after the eruption of a potential corruption scandal involving Karina and her top lieutenants, Lower House Speaker Martín Menem and his cousin, Eduardo ‘Lule’ Menem, which has been devastating for the Milei administration in terms of its public perception as crusaders against the political “caste.” It is also highly relevant that the corruption accusations came days before an important election in Buenos Aires Province and the much-anticipated legislative midterm elections scheduled for October. This is not the only threat to the integrity of the journalistic ecosystem, both emanating from Javier Milei’s despising the media and also from external factors.

The stay was granted by Judge Alejandro Marianello of Civil and Commercial Federal Court No. 5, in Buenos Aires City. It was an unusual ruling for a magistrate normally focused on business dealings and the private sector – he is also a controversial judge, with six accusations against him before the Council of Magistrates (the body that hires and fires judges) including overstepping his authority, sexual abuse, and embezzlement. (The body recently ordered Marianello to plead his case, name an attorney and bring his evidence to the table, meaning the legal ball is already rolling against him.) “The government was looking for a magistrate desperate enough to sign something like this and they found him,” judicial sources, unhappy with their colleague, told Noticias magazine.

Marianello’s controversial ruling appears destined to collapse under its own weight. It generates a situation of what is known as “prior restraint,” a form of censorship that is pretty explicitly blocked by the Constitution and previous jurisprudence. It also acknowledges the constitutional right to freedom of expression – and goes on to block it by noting a violation of Karina’s intimacy, even though she was recorded at the Casa Rosada while acting as a public servant. Ironically, it confirms the veracity of the covert recordings and only blocks the publishing of those that occurred on August 29 specifically.

The decision generated a sort of public relations disaster, amplifying the damage caused by the secret recordings by suggesting that whatever was revealed was so pernicious to the government that it had to be blocked at all costs. It came on the heels of the Diego Spagnuolo-ANDIS crisis, a scandal in which President Milei’s former personal lawyer and friend was secretly recorded exposing a supposed corruption scheme involving Karina that made the rounds and became the talk of the town. As explained previously, as inflation has come down, corruption has jumped as one of society’s main preoccupations. The founder of this publishing house, Jorge Fontevecchia, took the opportunity to appeal the stay, while most constitutional lawyers cried foul.

This is part of a sustained modus operandi by the Milei administration to try and weaken the media in order to force outlets to align with the official narrative of the Casa Rosada. Milei has been a fierce critic of journalists, calling them collectively corrupt (i.e. “ensobrados,” which roughly translates into “on the take”) while indicating that second intentions are always behind any negative coverage. Milei does not do press conferences and only accepts interviews from a handful of “friendly” reporters who agree to ask questions that are previously vetted by Milei’s team and even allow for original tapes to be edited, as was the case with the infamous interruption by Santiago Caputo, the President's controversial advisor, during an interview with Jonathan Viale about the’$LIBRA’ cryptocurrency corruption accusations. Other “friendlies” include Alejandro Fantino, Pablo Rossi, Esteban Trebucq and Luis Majul, among others. 

The La Libertad Avanz administration has also been copying the Kirchnerites they hate so much in order to silence their critics. They slashed official state advertising from the Presidency to zero and then forced media companies to negotiate individual deals through state-owned companies (YPF, Aerolineas Argentina, Banco Nación) in exchange for certain concessions in terms of coverage. Much like ex-presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, they’ve financed a parallel group of media outlets with state funds, in this case mainly digital natives based on YouTube and other social media platforms, such as streaming channel Carajo led by Daniel Parisini aka ‘Gordo Dan’ and Fantino’s Neura Media. The Milei administration has also used the state apparatus to try and asphyxiate critical media companies, among them Editorial Perfil, which has suffered the onslaught of the tax agencies, together with a payments freeze and discrimination in official advertising spend, which in Perfil’s case is zero.

The confrontation between leaders of the new right and the media is a constant across the globe.  As chairman of the New York Times Company AG Sulzberger has explained, there is a specific playbook that leaders including Donald Trump and Viktor Orban have utilised to take their countries towards totalitarianism. One of the key steps here is the subjugation of critical media. Milei has taken note, indicating that he “doesn’t hate journalists enough” and pushing for a world free from media companies. He believes in total disintermediation and direct connection between leaders and the people through social media. At the same time, he’s built his political capital on the premise that “synthetic power” (as defined in previous columns) is the basis of his political substantiation. This is the capacity to utilise his influence in the digital ecosystem to build real world power. Milei and his libertarians are social media experts, able communicators who know what the public, and more specifically the algorithms, want. This is, in great part ,what allowed La Libertad Avanza to outmanoeuvre the traditional political coalitions that dominated the scene for nearly two decades. It isn’t clear whether Milei has lost some of the representation of the groups that took him to the Casa Rosada, in many cases youngsters spread geographically through the country and crossing social classes.

Major Silicon Valley technology firms have also played their part. From Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to Elon Musk’s acquisition of X (formerly Twitter), digital platforms and social media firms have relaxed their content monitoring in order to please and support Trump and other leaders of the new right. These companies were critical of Trump and the broader MAGA and Tea Party ecosystem during the years of Barack Obama’s US Presidency and even when Joe Biden won election to the White House, but they quickly changed tack once Trump won his second term. Zuckerberg, together with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook and Musk were all present at Trump’s inauguration. These are among the most valuable companies in the world and all are in the artificial intelligence race, trying to outpace each other to develop “superintelligence.” They’ve used and abused their monopoly power, much to the expense of traditional media companies which failed to adapt their business models to the Internet age. Journalism has suffered as media outlets have seen advertising revenues gobbled up by tech juggernauts, which now train their AI models on, among other things, the journalistic content produced by these firms. The continued decline of journalism will harm democracy.

The impacts are clear in Argentina. President Milei and sister Karina have gone on the offensive against the media and despite some backlash, there doesn’t seem to be any real consequences of getting a controversial judge to pass an unconstitutional ruling. Ultimately, Milei is banking on his economic record in order to orchestrate a “purple tide” in October's midterms. Tomorrow’s elections will be a first test to see whether the population cares about these things. ​