On June 22, 1996, this medium published a cover with the title “Herr Minister.” In it a young Rodolfo Barra – at that time in charge of the Justice portfolio – was seen raising his arm at a Nazi meeting. Two months passed from when that note came out until Carlos Menem asked him to resign. Except for Página/12, which some time later discovered that Barra had attacked a synagogue, no media covered the news. Not one, which must have been surprising to his readers – in a pre-internet era – when they had to announce that the former Nazi was leaving his position without first raising the issue.
That’s the first act. The second is more current. In May 2022, this medium published on its cover all the plagiarisms that Javier Milei had made in his then last book, “Pandenomics”, an investigation by Tomás Rodríguez. It was a central theme, since it exposed the libertarian’s idea of being a top economist (no one who knows needs to copy himself) and his thesis that he came to put an end to those “who steal” (plagiarism is a crime in the Penal Code). . From that publication until this closing, not once was he asked about the topic in the thousands of interviews that Milei gave. As was proven in the pre-election debate, in which Massa blurted the matter out in his face, it was a more than juicy topic for a story: that night it was one of the most searched topics on Google.
Another chapter could be included, although this one is extremely tragic. In September 1991 NOTICIAS published the first article written about Alfredo Yabrán. In the years that followed, not a single major media investigated him, and they only “discovered” him when Cavallo denounced him from Congress. That was at the end of 1995, months before the photo that José Luis Cabezas took of the dark businessman in Pinamar.
This story is divided into three acts over time, but one line unites it: that of journalism. Or, perhaps better said, that of journalism that shines and screams for its absence.
On Friday the 1st – the same day it became known that Milei appointed Barra to his Government – FOPEA chose “El Loco” as the best research book of the year. It was a text that began with these pages, from where I began to follow Milei at the start of 2021. And it is, as FOPEA understood, a research work that is not born from an ideologized, politicized and much less partisan perspective. The data collected in the book present an unappealable conclusion: it is a true question whether Milei, an unstable leader, is qualified to lead a country as unstable as this one. Perhaps if NOTICIAS had not been, once again, one of the few media outlets to investigate it, this reality would have been better known.
by RN
