Ernestina Herrera de Noble, who built a media empire in Argentina, dies at 92
Last edited Tue Aug 22, 2017, 12:01 PM - Edit history (2)
Ernestina Herrera de Noble, who transformed her late husband’s newspaper into Argentina’s most powerful media organization, a telecommunications giant whose size allowed her to tangle with presidents and quietly shape national politics to her advantage, died June 14. She was 92.
Ernestina Laura Herrera was born in Buenos Aires in 1925, the youngest of six children of Spanish immigrants.
A former Flamenco dancer, she once said that she met her future husband, who was 23 years her senior, during a 1946 cruise down the Paraná River. Roberto Noble, a wealthy rancher with a reputation as a charismatic womanizer, had served as a minister to a conservative Buenos Aires Province governor before founding the Buenos Aires-based news daily Clarín in 1945.
They saw each other intermittently and married in 1967, by which time Noble had divorced another woman.
Following Noble’s death in 1969, Mrs. Herrera de Noble vied for control of the paper with a daughter, Guadalupe Noble, from his earlier marriage. They eventually settled in court, with Mrs. Herrera de Noble taking control of Clarín.
Running Clarín
The paper — its name means “bugle” in Spanish — featured striking, photo-filled front pages designed to capture a working-class audience, and grew to become Argentina's largest in 1965. Yet by the time of Noble’s death, it had fallen into debt.
She surrounded herself with talented advisers - including accountant Héctor Magnetto, Grupo Clarín’s current CEO - and within a decade, the paper became a political heavyweight, buying provincial dailies, local radio stations, websites, film productions, printing plants, a wireless carrier, and the country’s largest cable and internet business, Cablevisión.
With annual revenue of $3 billion, the Clarín Group is today among the largest telecom businesses in Latin America.
The election of right-wing President Mauricio Macri in 2015, whom the group's outlets supported, helped it expand further as televised football rights were privatized (sold to a Fox/Turner/Clarín consortium), and regulations were rolled back to allow it to enter the Argentine mobile phone market.
Macri was denounced in December by the three leading mobile carriers - Spain's Telefónica, Carlos Slim's América Móvil, and France's Telecom - for allowing Clarín's Nextel unit free access to 4G networks that had cost $2 billion between them.
Kingmaker and power player
The company’s growth was driven in part by close relations with presidents and dictators who approved successive buyouts of competitors. They regarded Mrs. Herrera de Noble as a kingmaker, a backroom operator capable of cutting deals or skewering her opponents with negative press coverage.
Clarín's coverage, it was said, could “topple presidents with five headlines.”
Its most controversial such relationship was with the military dictatorship in power between 1976 and 1983. It was then that Mrs. Herrera de Noble joined with two rival papers (one of which Clarín later bought out) to purchase the country’s main newsprint manufacturer, Papel Prensa - giving it the power to limit access competitors' access to newsprint.
A number of competing dailies folded, and were absorbed into the Clarín Group, incorporated in 1999.
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a left-wing populist opposed by Clarín, ordered investigations in 2010 into links between Mrs. Herrera de Noble and atrocities committed during the Dirty War of the 1970s and early ’80s.
Kirchner and her allies charged that the 1977 purchase of Papel Prensa was facilitated by the junta. Mrs. Herrera de Noble, they said, was complicit in the sale and in the subsequent torture and murder of associates of the plant’s former owners.
Her two children, whom she said she adopted in 1976, were likewise alleged to have been stolen from mothers abducted as political prisoners during the Dirty War. An estimated 30,000 people were killed or “disappeared” by the military during the conflict - while Clarín and other Argentine papers, partly out of fear, avoided coverage.
She and Clarín “were always a power player,” Clarín historian Graciela Mochkofsky noted. The company, she said, was “opportunistic .?.?. always negotiating behind closed doors, with every government from the dictatorship on, to obtain licenses for cable television or support for their business growth.”
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ernestina-herrera-de-noble-who-built-a-media-empire-in-argentina-dies-at-92/2017/06/15/a9a93486-5149-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.ef1279b4b78e
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Her publishing empire worked hard to whitewash the torture, murder, villainy of the military dictatorship, to make sure the people remained almost as ignorant as possible.
Ernestina Herrera de Noble
Often in the company of Jorge Rafael Videla, military dictator President of Argentina, attending events, being toasted for her work pulling the wool over the reading public's eyes, making sure only the "good" news about the monsters (invented, of course) got published, she has been highly feted and recognized for decades among the oligarchs, elites.
Ernestina, taking her Dirty War stolen, adopted children to meet Pope Paul.
Ernestina, being adored by her kids,
who knew it was better to be on her
"good" side.
