“One of Milei’s biggest adversaries has been journalism,” Gonzalo Sarasqueta, the director of political communications studies at Spain’s Universidad Camilo José Cela, who studies populist rhetoric in Latin America, told Jacobin. The other has been the state. “What’s better than killing two birds with one stone, taking apart the media and attacking the state?” he said of Milei’s dismantling of Télam.
The attacks against Télam fit into a broader political communication strategy of defining the enemy and setting the narrative, Sarasqueta said. “He’s fighting against singer Lali Espósito much as Donald Trump fights against Taylor Swift.”
Since Milei took office, the impact on media has been notable. Argentina’s ranking in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index has dropped by twenty-six places. In December, journalist and feminist Luciana Peker left the country after feeling threatened in Argentina. Milei has regularly demonized not only progressive and state-run media but also private outlets like Clarín and La Nación — preferring instead to use social media to broadcast his message, Sarasqueta explained.
“All the media does for him is distort the message, and this is a very Gramscian interpretation,” Sarasqueta said. “They are part of the cultural battle, and they defend interests that are against the interests of the majority of the people, of the people that Javier Milei defends.”
Télam employees worried about the long-term impacts of this strategy on the country’s press ecosystem.
Eliaschev, the Télam editor and trade unionist, noted that Télam was a key way of transmitting information from the capital to Argentina’s provinces, economically impoverished regions that overwhelmingly voted for Milei. The death by a thousand cuts strategy meant that these regions were the first to lose access to the news.
Nonetheless he remained hopeful that under a new government, Télam might be able to come back from its embers.
“The important thing to highlight is that the government did not manage to close the Télam agency, but they had to transform it,” he said. “Let’s say they managed to shrink it, but there is still a public news agency.” That, at least, is a reprieve.
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