“On the day of the milky journalist…happy anniversary“he posted Alberto Fernandez in his personal account of X. The former Peronist president accompanied the message addressed to Jonathan Viale sharing a fragment of the interview that the journalist conducted with Javier Milei, a year ago, in which he allowed himself to be interrupted in the middle of the report by the advisor Santiago Caputo. Mauro Viale’s son was critical and incisive against the former president’s management, while encouraging the measures of the current libertarian Head of State and his Government.
It was on Monday, February 17, 2025 that an interview agreed between the president Milei and Viale —conceived as a defense from the president in the midst of the international cryptocurrency scandal $POUND—which ended up involved in another scandal that spilled over into politics, the media and social networks.
The interview, conducted for All News (TN)had progressed smoothly for more than an hour, with Viale raising questions about the head of state’s responsibility in promoting $LIBRA and the judicial consequences of his actions. But the dialogue broke down abruptly in the final stretch when Santiago Caputoapproached the president and cut off the recording to “correct” the line of responses, in a gesture that surprised even those occupying the studio.
The raw footage of that moment—which was later leaked online—shows the exact sequence: while Viale insisted on a point about the legal case, Caputo approaches Milei and, after a whisper, orders the interview to be resumed with another question. On the screen you see Viale go back and reformulate: “How were we coming…?”, as if nothing had happened, an edition that later generated a furor on the networks and triggered criticism from all sectors of journalism.
Hours after the event, after the sequence went viral, Viale broke the silence and on his radio program in Radio Rivadaviatook some responsibility for how the situation developed. He admitted that Caputo’s intervention was a “mistake” and that he himself was wrong for not stopping the advisor’s interference. “My mistake is that I lacked firmness to send Santiago Caputo to hell… I was afraid that the grade would be suspended,” he publicly acknowledged.
The driver clarified that his priority at that moment was that the note existed and was issuedafter a weekend where I was convinced that I could drop the interview completely due to the media impact of the $LIBRA case. “All weekend I was afraid that the interview would fall through,” he said, adding that he had not received hidden payments from the Government, as some of his detractors implied. The journalist also reported that Caputo later contacted to apologize. for the interruption, and that the president described the advisor’s intervention as “unnecessary.”
The reaction within journalism was immediate. Organizations like the Argentine Journalism Forum (Fopea) They criticized Viale for allowing the modification of the record and for agreeing to the withdrawal of part of the interview that could have exposed uncomfortable responses from Milei. Some colleagues described it as “operator” or having acted lukewarmly in the face of power, questioning his role as an interviewer at a time of political tension.
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