Argentina
The Argentine media system is in a period of transition. Traditional media struggle to retain audiences and advertising income, as interest in news remains low and trust in media declines. Meanwhile, emerging formats like livestreaming video are gaining prominence in how people, particularly younger users, access news and information.
Television remained a weekly source of news for about half of the respondents, and print reach was largely unchanged. However, Clarín, Argentina’s highest-circulation print newspaper, reported a reduction in their daily print run to 34,000 copies at the end of 2025, from 38,000 the previous year, while its digital subscription base remained stable at 647,000 paying readers. Its main competitor, La Nación, recorded 386,000 digital subscribers over the same period.
FOPEA (the Argentine Journalism Forum) documented a net loss of 196 journalism organisations between 2021 and 2025, with more than 40% of the Argentine territory now consisting of ‘news deserts’ lacking local news outlets and facing extremely difficult conditions for practising journalism.1 In a context of ongoing antagonism from President Milei towards journalists, FOPEA also reported that 2025 was the most critical year for press freedom in Argentina since it began tracking cases in 2008, with 278 recorded attacks – a 55% increase from 2024 – including physical assaults, judicial harassment, and online intimidation. These developments are reflected in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, where Argentina fell several positions in the ranking in 2026.
Following a recession in 2024, total advertising spending grew by 30% in 2025, but the number of ads and total seconds of advertising declined by 8% and 6%, respectively, indicating higher advertising prices. Digital advertising (including social media and search) accounted for 47% of total investment, 3pp more than in 2024, while television, radio, and print continued to lose share.2 Journalists’ salaries remain low, with seven in ten reporters earning below the poverty line for a family of four. In February 2026, Congress repealed the Journalist’s Statute, which provided special protections for reporters in cases of layoffs and had been in force since 1947.
Changes in the market structure underscore the declining relevance of legacy media. Paramount Global, which owned Telefe, the highest-rated television network in Argentina, sold its stake to a domestic business conglomerate in August 2025. No major transnational media companies currently hold significant ownership in the Argentine media sector. The Milei administration had pledged to privatise publicly owned radio and television outlets, long criticised for favouring the governing party under successive administrations, but has since set that plan aside. Instead, the government announced that several matches of the upcoming men’s football World Cup will be broadcast on the public television network, which is expected to boost advertising spending and viewership in 2026.
In what continues to be a highly polarised media environment, interest in news remains low: only 43% of respondents say they are extremely or very interested in news, while trust in news reached record lows, as only 26% of respondents trust the news. Despite this, weekly news use on the internet, social media, television, and print has remained stable. Moreover, almost one in ten respondents now report getting news from AI chatbots, a rise of 4pp from 2025. The share of people paying for news remains low at 10%, reflecting the combination of relatively low interest and very low trust in the media, as well as widespread budgetary constraints across households.
In this context, a vibrant creator scene has emerged in Argentina, with influencers and online personalities offering free content. Many professional journalists have also launched newsletters, which they distribute at no cost while requesting voluntary contributions. Online live video has also grown in prominence as interest in traditional news declines. The format, which emerged during the COVID‑19 pandemic, consists mainly of talk‑based programmes streamed on YouTube that combine commentary, interviews, and occasional news with lighter elements such as music or live performances. It has become an increasingly important source of information, particularly among younger audiences.
Luzu TV is cited as a news source by 13% of respondents, up from 8% the previous year (19% among those under 35). Both Luzu and its main competitor, Olga, have more than 2m YouTube subscribers. Most hosts are not professional journalists and do not present themselves as such. Although they invite columnists for more serious coverage of breaking news, their role resembles that of talk‑show hosts. These formats encourage audience participation by reading messages posted on YouTube, inviting contributions, and maintaining a light‑hearted atmosphere.
Eugenia Mitchelstein and Pablo Boczkowski
Center for the Study of Media and Society, Argentina (MESO)
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Broadcast and print consumption have stabilised, with around half of the population watching TV news and one-eighth reading print news weekly. Meanwhile, nearly eight in ten get news online, including 9% who use AI chatbots.
Pay for online news
10%
(-1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
46%
(-)
Trust in news overall
26%
(-6)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news fell 6pp to 26%, the lowest level in a decade. However, respondents assign higher levels of confidence to certain media brands. Outlets such as Telefe, TN, La Nación+, and Infobae are trusted by more than half of the public, indicating that brand-level credibility persists even as trust in the media sector as a whole erodes.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
98/180
Score 52.44
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://desiertosdenoticiaslocales.fundaciongabo.org/dashboard/
2 Argentine Chamber of Media Agencies 2025. https://agenciasdemedios.com.ar/caam-informa-la-inversion-publicitaria-en-medios-de-argentina-en-2025/