Argentina’s president takes on media giant

BUENOS AIRES | An epic battle between Argentina’s two reigning powers — the presidency and media giant Grupo Clarin — started with a political cartoon, the way one editor tells it.

When President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was drawn with an X taped over her mouth, she called it a “mafia-like” threat and accused “media generals” of using their newspapers and TV stations to rally her opponents.

She and her husband and predecessor, former President Nestor Kirchner, told Clarin to be more “disciplined,” Editor Ricardo Kirschbaum recalls — one of many attempts to control the paper’s coverage.

Now, in the name of “freedom of speech,” Mrs. Kirchner has proposed a law that would break up Clarin, one of Latin America’s largest newspaper and cable TV companies, piece by piece.

The dispute involves motives of profit and power far more complex than a drawing published in March 2008 during a heated national debate over Mrs. Kirchner raising taxes on soy profits.

Since last year, the fight has become vindictive and costly.

Clarin has published expose after expose accusing the Kirchners and other government officials of illegal enrichment and abuse of power. The Kirchners have responded in kind, using taxpayer money and government officials to attack Clarin’s bottom line.

Last week, 200 tax agents were sent to question Clarin’s employees. This week, appellate judges will hear arguments in open court that the Clarin director’s children were illegally adopted orphans of Argentina’s dirty war.

“This is a war without mercy, a bloody fight to the death,” said Henoch Aguiar, a former Argentine communications secretary.

Mrs. Kirchner now blames Grupo Clarin’s critical coverage for her 20 percent approval rating and for punishing losses in June’s midterm elections. It’s a strange situation for both sides because the interests of Clarin and the presidency have long been intertwined.

Argentina’s largest and most-respected newspaper survived and prospered under dictators and leaders from right to left, and its coverage fit more or less comfortably within Mr. Kirchner’s agenda as he brought the country out of an economic meltdown.

Mr. Kirchner rewarded Grupo Clarin during his final week as president by approving a cable TV merger that created a near-monopoly for a company that already owned newspapers, magazines, Internet portals, television channels and radio stations. Clarin cable now reaches 80 percent of the homes in the capital and about 50 percent nationwide.

But in Clarin’s huge newsroom, editors and reporters watching Mrs. Kirchner denounce them on television three months into her presidency realized that the relationship was broken, probably for good.

“It was a turning point,” Mr. Kirschbaum, the Clarin editor, recalled in an interview. “From there the political tension with the media grew.”

Mrs. Kirchner made good on her threat to take up a media reform project that Clarin and previous governments had repeatedly blocked in the 25 years since Argentina’s dictatorship fell.

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