“One less, this one won’t bother us anymore,” he once said, when a robbery victim killed the thief. “Society doesn’t want to be from the slums, or have gay parents,” he said on another occasion, when an LGBTQ+ pride march was being organized. Argentine journalist Eduardo Feinmann, with a career spanning more than 30 years in radio and television, has cultivated a persona that is intended to be tough and ruthless. He is as recognizable for the cadence of his voice—with its strained irony and affected seriousness—as for his consistent choice of enemies: feminists and sexual minorities, union members, Indigenous people, human rights activists, and protesting students.
His outbursts, the habitual expression of his particular brand of political incorrectness, have consistently placed him in the spotlight. As has the dissemination of dubious news. In recent days, his comments have allowed him to transcend his country’s borders. Like last week, when he claimed that Ecuador’s defeat to Mexico in the World Cup was largely due to death threats against the South American players from a Mexican cartel—a claim denied by the Ecuadorian Football Federation. Or like this week, when he made these remarks after England eliminated Mexico: “I detest Mexicans, I detest them with all my soul. They can shove that guy up their ass. Those guys are detestable. The envy Mexicans have for Argentinians, not just in football, they want to be like us but they don’t have the guts,” he said.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded this Wednesday at her daily press conference at the National Palace. After repeating Feinmann’s statements, she called him a “pseudo-journalist” allied with the Mexican right wing. “Outrageous, but it speaks volumes about who he is,” he added regarding Feinmann’s statement. “If this journalist hates Mexicans and the Mexican right wing likes this journalist, then the Mexican right wing hates the Mexican people; it’s direct transitivity,” he said.
At 67, Eduardo Feinmann is one of Argentina’s most prominent media personalities. Every morning he hosts one of the most listened-to radio programs on Radio Mitre, and every afternoon he anchors a news program on the television channel A24. He is one of the few journalists in the country to whom the far-right president Javier Milei grants interviews, although he has asserted that he is not a right-winger. His daily discourse reveals a position opposed to Peronism, especially Kirchnerism, and left-wing parties.
On Wednesday afternoon, Feinmann dedicated a significant portion of his TV program to reviewing his remarks about Mexicans. Unusually, and with some nuances and caveats, he apologized. “I made a comment that angered millions of Mexicans, and frankly, they have a right to be angry with me,” he said. “I want to be very clear: it wasn’t a xenophobic comment, it wasn’t a hate message. We were talking about soccer,” he explained. “It wasn’t directed against the Mexican people, not at all […] If any Mexican felt that my words were affecting them personally, I want to tell them that wasn’t the intention.” At the same time, the journalist intensified his confrontation with Sheinbaum: “It seems to me that the president of Mexico has much more important things to worry about: the growing insecurity and crime in her country, corruption, inequality, and drug trafficking.”
Feinmann’s career began in the mid-1990s on Argentina’s public television network (ATC), and he later worked in various private media outlets. In the book The Construction of the Fascist Dwarf (2019), sociologist Daniel Feierstein includes Feinmann among the prominent journalists who, since those years, “began to deploy micro-fascist communication methods, articulating increasingly violent forms of stigmatization with calls for reactionary citizen rebellions or the free expression of prejudices,” the promoters of “a permanent shifting of the boundaries of what is politically acceptable in journalism, with the use of foul language, trickery, or mockery as permanent modes of interpellation.”
