This note on Jorge Lanata It necessarily has to start with something similar to a contradiction: the person who died on Monday, December 30, after spending more than six months hospitalized, was not a journalist. Although Lanata founded the legendary Página/12, although for twelve seasons he kept his program PPT at the top of the national television ratings, although some of his notes and interviews were viewed tens of thousands of times, the man was not a journalist . It was, in truth, a phenomenon that would be studied in a sociology degree rather than in a communication degree.
One could say that it was, above all, a social fact, similar to what Diego Maradona or Charly García were: characters who seem to be one meter away from the rest, who awaken passions and who with their voices generate debates that take place from the neighborhood butcher shop to the hallways of the Casa Rosada. Even Lanata did it after he died. Its passage to posterity was the cause of a national debate that included the silence of the leaders who marked and mark an era, Cristina Kirchner and Javier Mileiand the crossings of fans from both sides. Lanata died at the age of 64 and it would seem that with him also died a side of the profession: the journalist, half detective and half TV celebrity, whose last name resonated throughout the country.
Genesis
Lanata was more than Lanata for several reasons. His last name could be used as a verb – to do something transgressive, controversial, innovative – and also as much more. It could be said that, without having created any political current – not at least a formal one -, man had founded his own “ism”.
At the end of the ’80s, when democracy was still fresh and the carapintada uprisings loomed on the horizon, he launched Página/12 when he was only 26 years old. And with him he saw the birth of the firstlanatism”. At that time and for more than two decades, his last name would be synonymous with the disruptive journalism that was the innovative brand that that newspaper carried: the image gained much more prominence on the covers, which began to be less sober and more relaxed in their titles, a period climate of which this medium was also part.
In fact, in that decade of one-on-one and pizza with champagne, Página/12 and NOTICIAS were the two great sleuths that exposed the side of Carlos Menem’s government that the majority of the traditional media used to ignore. The Swiftgate, the bribery case that forced Menemism to change half the cabinet, and the discovery of the attack on a synagogue made by the then Minister of Justice, Rodolfo Barra, in his time as a youthful Nazi, were some of the discoveries that marked that was.
But the journalistic investigations carried out by that luxury editorial team – Tomas Eloy Martínez, Juan Gelman, Osvaldo Bayer, Horacio Verbitsky, and a group of young people who would later become masters of the trade, such as Ernesto Tenembaum, Cristián Alarcón, María O’Donnell or Reynaldo Sietecase– was just one side of the coin. The other was Lanata, voice and embodiment of that medium, who did much more than put a newspaper on the street: with the subtlety of a blow to the jaw she discussed the ethos of journalism by informing Clarín and La Nación, the historic Argentine newspapers , that they were no longer alone on the block. From those years, his discussion with Mariano Grondona on his program “Hora Clave” remained in the archive for all time, in which he defined himself as a “left-wing liberal” and demanded his coverage during the military dictatorship.
That spicy interview, in 1990, also meant much more than a note: it was the notice that Lanata had arrived to sit at the table of the greats of this profession.
Legacy
The journalist died 34 years after that crossing with Grondona. Some things had not changed, like the fact that until the day he had to be hospitalized, he continued working on his own and being at the center of the news. But others did change. Lanata from Página/12 and the one from recent years were separated by a long series of events.
The first was that the search for massiveness, an ambition that everyone who knew him closely says he always had, was found not in graphics but in radio and especially television. first with “D-Day”a cycle that started on the América channel in 1996 and that left some of its most iconic moments – the first being his braid with the rocker García and the now indelible “you’re an idiot, but a good one, because you appear on television” – , and especially what he did from Channel 13, with “Periodismo Para Todos”.
That program, which had twelve seasons, was what finally installed Lanata definitively in the majority of Argentine homes. And something else: he became one of the faces, perhaps the most referenced, of all those who at that time were on the opposite side of Kirchnerism. If in the ’90s Lanata was the north of a generation disenchanted with Menemism, to which Página/12 spoke from its pages sprinkled with progressive overtones and with a hitherto unprecedented interest in human rights and the disappeared, in the second decade of the 2000s that compass was transformed. With it, the meaning and standard-bearers in the “lanatism”: from then on the keywords would be “Cristina” and “corruption”the cause and consequence, for this movement, of all the ills of Argentina.
Lanata himself had an explanation for this turn, in which he went from criticizing, investigating and competing with Grupo Clarín to working there. “He who does not change over the years is an idiot,” he used to repeat, with his acid style and always with a cigarette in his hand. From these years, investigations such as “the K money route” remain in the memory, the night of the delivery of the Martín Fierro family at the Teatro Colón in which he established – forever? – the word “crack” to define the present Argentine and also the participation of Mauricio Macri in the journalist’s wedding, sitting at the main table.
Justice
Lanata continued practicing journalism until the last day she could. And in recent times he was the first to do something that until then had no record: put a stop to the current President. In April of last year Lanata announced that she would sue Javier Milei for slander. The president, on network
That is a habit that the libertarian has with the press almost daily. Since he took office, it would seem that his great enemy is journalism, a profession that he not only attacks daily, but for which he has even harangued the crowd to insult him. And that is only the visible face: underneath, the Government commits abuses and illegalities by discriminating in the official guidelines.
However, Lanata differentiated herself from the rest of her attacked colleagues and took Milei to trial, something this editorial also later did. “It is one thing to be called a bad journalist, but another very different thing is to be called ‘overwhelmed’; they are accusing you of a crime. Just as when we accuse politicians of crimes we try to have all the possible evidence, the President should try something similar,” Lanata said when he presented the case.
Censorship
The journalist spoke about two topics that are usually left silent when talking about Milei’s attacks, something that many want to minimize by calling them “his ways.” One is the impact that a presidential advance has not only on the current target. “It seeks to generate self-censorship in other colleagues. Imagine if this is said to me, what could an intern who is in a newspaper think? He stays silent so as not to get into trouble,” he said. And on the other hand, he pointed out how the word of a leader conditions and transforms reality beyond the limits of the immediate, something he did after an encounter he had on the air with Patricia Bullrich. “The fact that Milei ‘is like that’ and that we have to accept it that way is a logic that is valid only for a four or five year old child. It doesn’t work like that for a President.”
His entire biography explains what happened after his death. Something happened there that a priori speaks well of an investigative journalist: criticism came from both sides of the divide. And also silences. Cristina Kirchner and Javier Milei avoided commenting on Lanata’s death. In the case of the second it was perhaps more striking: some friends that the journalist had are either part of the Government, like Patricia Bullrich, or have helped him, like former president Mauricio Macri.
An unusual event even happened, when the driver Ángel de Brito contacted the President to find out his opinion. But the one who answered him was the couple, Yuyito González, who told him that Milei only talked about “management issues.” To refute the argument, hours after this response the libertarian was uploading to his networks a video of a man who tries to set off a firecracker tied to his waist and ends up hurting his sensitive parts.
Santiago Caputo, the President’s star advisor, took it to another level. In an account on the social network His last years as an anti-Kirchnerist were not enough to repair that damage, may God have mercy on his soul,” he said in a post, a while before uploading another in which he said that that Monday he had fired “a thousand” shots in practice. In this climate of tension, the last mass journalist died. Trapped in the word he himself created.
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