About El Destape

El Destape

Overview

El Destape, also known in full as El Destape Web, is an Argentine digital news portal published in Spanish from Buenos Aires. Launched in 2014, it was founded by the Argentine economic journalist Roberto Navarro, who remains its editorial director. The portal is owned by Talar Producciones S.A. and works from a newsroom at Cerrito 1164 in the City of Buenos Aires. Its reporting is centred principally on politics and the economy, at both national and international level, although it also publishes material on entertainment, sport and general culture.

The outlet belongs to the generation of digital-native media that grew up in Argentina in the 2010s, when journalists who had built their reputations in print, radio and television began to create online titles of their own. In the case of El Destape, the connection to broadcasting is present in the name itself. The portal takes its name and its origins from the television programme of the same name that Navarro hosted, first on the cable news channel CN23 and later, until 2017, on C5N. The website was therefore not conceived as the online edition of a newspaper, but as a news operation in its own right, built around a well-known presenter and a recognisable programme brand.

From the beginning, El Destape has presented itself with a clear editorial identity. It follows a line that revolves around progressivism and the centre-left of Argentine politics, it was critical of the government of Mauricio Macri from its early years, and it is critical of the role of the country's dominant, or hegemonic, media groups and their influence over part of society. That combination of political reporting, economic analysis and open editorial positioning explains both its loyal audience and its prominent place in debates about partisanship, public funding and press freedom in Argentina.

History and founding

El Destape Web was launched in 2014. Its developer and founder was Roberto Navarro, an economist by training who had turned to journalism in his mid-thirties and had become known as an economic writer and broadcaster. Navarro is listed not only as founder but also as the portal's editorial director, a dual role that has shaped the title throughout its life. The project gave him a platform that he controlled directly, alongside his television work, rather than a column or programme inside a media group owned by someone else.

The timing of the launch mattered. By 2014 Navarro was hosting El Destape and Economía Política on C5N, and the portal's Editoriales section was used, among other things, to promote those programmes while they were broadcast by C5N. The website and the television programmes supported each other: television gave the founder visibility and a Sunday and weekday audience, while the portal gave his journalism a permanent, searchable home that could publish at any hour and could carry investigations and opinion beyond the limits of a broadcast schedule.

The portal's early years were also marked by confrontation. In 2014 Navarro reported that he had received threats by telephone, threats that were reported at the time by the Fundación LED and by other Buenos Aires media. References to that episode, and to later threats linked to investigations into money laundering and political corruption, recur in accounts of the outlet's history. They form part of the context in which El Destape developed its self-image as a title willing to publish material that, in its own account, more powerful media and political actors would prefer not to see aired.

Founder Roberto Navarro

Roberto Daniel Navarro was born on 22 October 1959 in El Talar, in the Tigre district of Greater Buenos Aires, where he was also raised. He graduated from an industrial school and then studied economics, graduating as a licenciado in economics. After graduating he founded a small and medium-sized enterprise, a pyme, in which he worked for the following years. At the age of 35 he decided to move into journalism and began to study at the Taller Escuela Agencia, known as TEA, in the City of Buenos Aires.

His first job as a journalist was at the morning newspaper Página/12, where he worked between 1996 and 2002. There he wrote in the Economy section and in the Cash supplement. He later worked at the newspaper Tiempo Argentino, founded in 2010. That print background as an economic writer is central to the identity of El Destape. The portal is not led by a generalist presenter who later adopted economic themes, but by a journalist whose specialism in economics preceded his television career and whose editorial direction continues to give economic policy a central place in the coverage.

Navarro's broadcasting career developed in parallel. Between 2011 and 2012 he worked on the news channel CN23, hosting the programme El Destape. In 2013 he moved that programme to C5N and added the programme Economía Política. He also took part as a columnist on economic topics in the C5N programme El diario and in the news portal Minuto Uno, and he hosted a radio version of El Destape on Radio 10 from August 2016. The Media Ownership Monitor for Argentina likewise describes him as an economist and journalist who worked as an economic writer at Página/12 and then as a columnist and host on several radio stations and television channels.

Ownership and headquarters

El Destape Web is owned by Talar Producciones S.A. The Media Ownership Monitor describes that company as controlled by Navarro together with his two children, Nicolás and María Florencia, and notes that Navarro is also the owner of the production company La Ñata, known as Producciones La Ñata. The monitor classifies the business form as private and its legal form as a joint-stock corporation. This is, in other words, a small, family-controlled digital media group rather than a title inside one of Argentina's large, diversified media conglomerates.

That ownership structure helps to explain the personal character of the outlet. The founder, the editor-in-chief and the controlling owner are the same person, so editorial direction and business control are unusually closely aligned. The Media Ownership Monitor lists Navarro in both roles, as founder and as editor-in-chief of ElDestapeWeb.com, the group's main medium. The wider El Destape group described by the monitor consists of the web portal as its principal outlet, together with El Destape Radio and El Destape TV as its other media.

The newsroom address recorded for the portal is Cerrito 1164, ground floor A, in the City of Buenos Aires. Cerrito is a central Buenos Aires street, close to the courts, government buildings and the traditional newspaper and broadcasting district of the capital. A central newsroom suits a portal whose core business is national politics and economy, because its reporters work within easy reach of Congress, ministries, party headquarters and the economic institutions whose decisions dominate its front page.

Editorial line

From the start, El Destape has sustained an ideology that revolves around progressivism and the centre-left of Argentine politics. Its published accounts note that it is at times openly favourable to trade union movements, and that from the beginning the portal maintained an editorial line critical of the government of Mauricio Macri. The Media Ownership Monitor summarises the same position more briefly, describing the portal as a news site focused on politics and economy with a profile that opposed the Macri administration.

Criticism of concentrated media ownership is a second, defining part of that line. El Destape is critical of the role of the hegemonic media in Argentina and of their influence over part of society. In practice that means its journalism frequently treats media power itself as a political subject, examining how large groups frame economic and electoral debates, rather than presenting itself as a neutral observer standing outside the media system. Readers are therefore offered not only news about government and opposition, but also a running argument about who controls public information in Argentina.

That openness about its position distinguishes El Destape from general-interest portals that emphasise impartiality as their main claim. Its readers know the broad direction from which its editorials and investigations will approach a government, a business group or a trade union dispute. Supporters value that clarity and its willingness to campaign on investigations; critics, by contrast, read the same clarity as partisanship. Both reactions have followed the title since its launch and are part of how it is understood in Argentine public life.

Coverage and sections

The core of El Destape is politics and economy, both national and international. Those two subjects dominate its identity in every independent description of the title, from its own presentation to the Media Ownership Monitor's profile. Political coverage includes government, opposition parties, elections, Congress and provincial politics insofar as it affects the national picture, while economic coverage draws directly on the founder's specialism and addresses policy, markets, prices, employment and the distributional effects of government decisions.

Beyond that core, the portal also sometimes publishes news related to show business, sport and general culture. That wider mix is typical of Argentine digital portals, which compete for a broad online audience throughout the day and cannot rely solely on parliamentary or macroeconomic news to sustain traffic. Entertainment and sport give the homepage breadth, while politics and economy retain editorial priority and provide the investigations and editorials for which the title is best known.

A named feature of the digital newspaper is its Editoriales section, in which the portal's writers publish their journalistic columns. The section gives El Destape a space distinct from straight news reporting, where opinion, interpretation and editorial argument are published under the writers' own names. Through that same section Navarro also used the portal to promote his political programmes while they were transmitted by C5N, a practice that continued until his definitive dismissal from that channel in 2017. The portal's content is free to read, and it operates a subscription system that allows readers to make a voluntary contribution to fund the project.

Investigations and notable reporting

The investigation most closely associated with El Destape's national impact was published in July 2018. Reporting by the portal's journalist Juan Amorín, also credited as Juan Ignacio Amorín, examined what became known as the aportantes truchos, or fake contributors, case. The investigation gave rise to a criminal complaint against the Propuesta Republicana party, known as PRO, in Buenos Aires Province. According to the published account, many people who belonged to social cooperatives under the Argentina Trabaja and Ellas Hacen programmes appeared as cash contributors to the Cambiemos campaign in the province of Buenos Aires, in an election in which Esteban Bullrich, Graciela Ocaña, Gladys González and Héctor Flores were candidates.

The same reporting was described as pointing to María Eugenia Vidal, then governor of Buenos Aires Province, as implicated in the matter. The Media Ownership Monitor, in its independent profile of the portal, records the episode in similar terms, noting that in July 2018 the site published several articles based on research about the Cambiemos party's fake campaign donations in 2015 and 2017, which led to a formal claim. The convergence of those accounts underlines why the investigation matters in the outlet's history: it moved a story that began on a digital portal into the courts and into the national political debate.

El Destape has also published data relating to the scandal of Swiss accounts held by businessmen and bankers who, during 2001, moved funds abroad in the crisis that culminated in the December 2001 bank run. The figure cited in that reporting is around 18,000 million dollars taken out of the country. That line of reporting fits the portal's wider preoccupation with capital flight, financial power and the conduct of Argentina's economic elite, themes that have recurred in Navarro's work since his years as an economic writer in print journalism.

Departure from C5N and the digital relaunch

The relationship between Navarro, C5N and its owner, Grupo Indalo, broke down in stages. In 2015 he hosted El Destape on C5N and on Radio 10, programmes the Media Ownership Monitor describes as a success. In December 2015 he was displaced from the channel for a period and then returned to the screen denouncing an attempt at censorship, and in March 2016 C5N prevented the broadcast of one of his reports. On 19 September 2017 he was dismissed from C5N after denouncing censorship by the channel's authorities, and he also left Radio 10, which belonged to the same group.

Navarro's own account, reported widely at the time, was that he had been removed because of his critical reporting on the Macri government and pressure applied to the channel and its owner. Whatever the internal causes, the practical effect is documented and undisputed: after leaving Grupo Indalo, he rebuilt his broadcasting presence on platforms he controlled. The Media Ownership Monitor records that, based on the news portal, Navarro created the digital signal El Destape Radio and the YouTube channel El Destape TV, which broadcast his live programme on Sundays.

That sequence is important to understanding the portal's later expansion. El Destape Web was founded while its founder still worked for a large group, but it became his principal platform once that employment ended. The special return programme promoted at the time with the slogan about showing what television no longer showed was distributed only through the web, through the portal itself, Facebook Live and the portal's YouTube channel. The episode demonstrated, before the radio and television launches that followed, that the portal could serve as the distribution centre for audio-visual journalism as well as text.

Expansion into radio and television

The portal's expansion into traditional media began in December 2019 with the launch of El Destape Radio. The station was conceived previously as a native streaming radio and went on air on 107.3 FM. In 2020 it arrived on AM through the duplex arrangements generated by Güemes 1050. About a year and a half later it legally acquired LR1, the licence that Radio El Mundo had operated during its time on air, and with it the station operates on 1070 AM. From 11 March 2024 El Destape continued only on 1070, as 107.3 took on the identity of ReFM, which would host new proposals on air.

Television followed. From 4 August 2023, El Destape TV has been available on the virtual channel 24.6 for the City of Buenos Aires and the metropolitan area on the TDA digital terrestrial system, and on channel 20 in high definition on Telecentro. Wikipedia's summary of the portal notes the same chronology in broader terms: the portal has had its own radio station since December 2019 and its own television signal since August 2023, and those outlets reproduce most of the portal's content. The radio station is owned, in the group's structure described by the Media Ownership Monitor, through La Ñata Producciones, while the web portal itself belongs to Talar Producciones.

The expansion reversed the usual direction of media convergence in Argentina. Instead of a legacy broadcaster building a website, a website built a broadcaster. The portal remained the group's main medium and its original brand, while radio gave it a daily, habitual presence in cars, workplaces and homes, and television restored the founder to a TV signal under his own control, several years after his departure from C5N. For audiences, the three outlets function as a single El Destape ecosystem, sharing presenters, investigations and editorial positions across text, audio and video.

Funding, audience and place in Argentine media

Funding has been a recurring subject in profiles of El Destape. The Media Ownership Monitor notes that the portal's content is free, supported by a subscription system under which readers can contribute voluntarily, and that, although it had received official advertising from the Argentine government in 2015, it received no funds from the national government in 2016, 2017 or 2018, during the Macri administration. The monitor also records, for the wider group, official advertising received during the preceding administration of Cristina Fernández, and none during the Macri administration. Those records are regularly cited by both supporters and critics when the outlet's independence and its political alignment are debated.

In audience terms, the monitor described El Destape as one of the most visited news websites in Argentina, with 0.10 percent of the digital audience according to SimilarWeb figures for October 2018. That figure is a dated snapshot rather than a current ranking, but it captures the portal's position at the end of its first four years: not the largest general-news site in the country, but a significant national title whose influence, particularly through investigations amplified by other media and by social networks, exceeded a simple traffic share.

El Destape therefore occupies a distinctive place in Argentina's digital news landscape. It is a Buenos Aires-based, Spanish-language portal founded and directed by a single journalist-owner, owned by his family's company, rooted in a television programme, and expanded, after a public break with a major media group, into a small group spanning web, radio and television. Its progressive, centre-left line, its concentration on politics and economy, and its record of investigations such as the 2018 fake contributors reporting ensure that it is read not only as a source of news, but also as an actor in the political and media contests it covers.