This recent focus on Argentina has highlighted a common tactic the media likes to use:
- Bad thing happens for long time: ignore, downplay.
- Bad thing continues to happen, but “enemy” person that can be blamed for it appears: suddenly it’s headline news and this new bad person caused the problem.
No one that has paid any attention to Argentina is surprised that the economy is chaotic and undergoing experiments of which the outcome is unclear.
This article "blames" everything that is wrong with Argentina on an "enemy" figure. It is generally accepted that monetary policy has a lead time of at least a couple of months (it took the FED at least one year [1]). The causal relationship implied in the article, regarding having a record high inflation in the month of January is pretty unlikely.
To be fair there's "bad" and there's "more than bad", this looks to be in the "more than bad" territory. And whenever I hear "Shock therapy" being mentioned I shiver, because it reminds me of my childhood and adolescence spent under such an economic policy in Eastern Europe back in the '90s. It was worse than hell, thinking back at it.
So all I can say it's that I wish the Argentinian people all the best, they're going to need it.
For sure I don’t want to come across as if I am on “Team Milei.” I am more just annoyed that these recent Argentina is imploding articles don’t spend any time discussing why the country is in the position it’s in, pretty much entirely because of ideological reasons. They only cover the story because it’s useful for bashing their opponents, not because they actually care.
Exactly, it's not much different from the clickbaity tabloid headlines: "ONG BAD STUFF HAPPENS HERE NOW". Very short sighted, and tend to finger current participants as bad, instead of offering a proper historical perspective, in this case that Argentine has been a repeat offender when it comes to defaults and debt restructurings during the 20th century.
I see the same tactic used by larger media outlets like the Financial Times or NYT all the time. I think it’s a symptom of the media environment as a whole. People subscribing / reading certain publications are self-selecting, and so the publications aren’t going to push news stories that go against whatever that ideology suggests.
- Bad thing happens for long time: ignore, downplay.
- Bad thing continues to happen, but “enemy” person that can be blamed for it appears: suddenly it’s headline news and this new bad person caused the problem.
No one that has paid any attention to Argentina is surprised that the economy is chaotic and undergoing experiments of which the outcome is unclear.