C5N's audience fell sharply after Cristina's arrest and Cristóbal López took control of the channel.

News channel C5N saw its audience decline by 16% in July, according to data from Kantar Ibope Media. Its authorities attribute this decline to the winter holidays, while other industry sources point to the decline's possible rise in Kirchnerism , since businessman Cristóbal López ousted his partner and took editorial control of the channel through the new CEO, Lisandro López.

Cristóbal López ousted his partner Fabián de Sousa and took control of Grupo Indalo's media outlets two months ago, as Clarín reported, to strengthen his support for former President Cristina Kirchner, just days before her conviction and arrest for corruption in road works was confirmed.

But the ultra-Kirchnerist radicalization of the content, which initially boosted C5N's audience in the heat of the demonstrations supporting Cristina and her son, Máximo, leader of La Cámpora, later caused a sharp drop in ratings, which plummeted 16% in July, falling to 1.92 points, from 2.29 in June, in line with the winter holidays and the arrival of new executives who report to the businessman closest to the former president.

This is how "characters who hadn't previously appeared on C5N" appeared, a source in the audiovisual industry told Clarín . He added: "Leopoldo Moreau, Eduardo Valdés, and Rodolfo Tailhade, among others, returned to the attack on the Supreme Court, from C5N, due to a political decision stemming from an agreement between Cristina Kirchner and Cristóbal López, and handed the channel's editorial line over to the Kirchnerites."

A journalist working for C5N mentioned international politics to Clarín in two articles that caught his attention regarding the Middle East conflict last month, as the war between Israel and Iran escalated. One of the articles was titled "Serious accusation from the president of Iran: 'Israel tried to assassinate me, but failed,'" featuring an interview with Persian President Masoud Pezeshkian. The other, from the previous day, read "The BRICS called for UN reform, a ceasefire in the Middle East, and condemned the attacks on Iran."

On the contrary, sources close to the current C5N authorities assured Clarín that the drop in ratings in July was "due to the winter holidays" and because the previous month they had peaked in ratings, when "there was a surge in audiences wanting to know everything that was happening with Cristina. As that attention fell, so did the ratings," C5N sources explained.

In fact, these sources from Cristóbal López 's channel emphasized that Nico Bocache remains in charge of content at C5N, and he has even expanded his hosting duties to Grupo Indalo radio stations. And the news channel gained ratings in July in the 4 p.m. time slot, hosted by Jorge Rial , through prime time at night, hosted by Gustavo Sylvestre and Pablo Duggan.

"In August, we can already see the recovery of our audience," with the end of the winter holidays and a greater politicization of society, ahead of the election year, added C5N sources.

Ibope's figures for the first six days of August show a cumulative rating of 1.92 for C5N, the same figure it had during the month of July. However, this is a growing trend in recent days that, if it continues, could lead the news channel to once again reach above two rating points, as estimated by the authorities of Cristóbal López's news channel.

At the end of last May , when Cristóbal López took control of Grupo Indalo's media outlets, the K businessman displaced his partner Fabián de Sousa and appointed Lisandro López as the new CEO of C5N, Radio 10, Ámbito Financiero and the news portal Minutouno, among other media outlets.

Lisandro López—who is not related to Cristóbal López—was the general manager of Providencia Seguros, one of Grupo Indalo's companies, and took over the leadership of all the group's media outlets, replacing Julián Leunda and Ignacio Vivas, who were removed and reported to De Sousa.

Until then, 70% of Indalo belonged to Cristóbal López and 30% to Fabián de Sousa, with the minority shareholder managing the media. However, since the end of last May, López has taken control of the media, leaving De Sousa to manage other companies in the group.

This is a separation of assets between the Indalo Group partners, who are increasingly at odds, but who cannot yet put it on paper because they have multiple pending legal cases that prevent them from transferring the agreement to their shareholdings.

Fabián de Sousa had managed to expand C5N's audience, which exceeded two rating points, through critical support for Kirchnerism, with journalists from different ideological positions and even some critics of Cristina Kirchner, with a closer alignment with Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof and international multilateralism.

But in this Kirchnerist internal conflict, Cristina Kirchner promoted the re-appointment of Cristóbal López as head of her media outlets , to radicalize their content, closer to La Cámpora, of her son Máximo, and to a close position with the governments of countries such as Russia, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, where Cristóbal López has oil businesses, thanks to his relationship with the lawyer linked to the intelligence services, Franco Bindi.

According to industry sources, this would have caused part of C5N's audience to migrate and its rating to drop by 16% in July, falling from 2.29 points to 1.92, in an unprecedented situation for that channel, which had been growing every month since the beginning of the year and was severely impacted when this situation was combined with a lower viewing rate of news channels due to the winter holidays.

López and De Sousa built the largest Kirchnerist media group since 2012, when they spent more than US$250 million acquiring newspapers, radio stations, news channels, and TV production companies, which they then put at the service of the "Kirchnerist narrative."

In exchange, then-President Cristina Kirchner allowed them to stop paying the Fuel Transfer Tax (ITC) for their oil company, Oil, which owed billions of pesos to the AFIP (Federal Administration of Public Prosecutors) when it was managed by Ricardo Echegaray, who was convicted of this irregularity. López and De Sousa were detained for almost two years but were later released and acquitted by the courts.

At the end of 2017, López and De Sousa were arrested. A year later, Cristóbal López took control of the media outlet from De Sousa, as the former head of C5N had frozen his accounts and could no longer sign or cash checks, which hampered the company's commercial operations, which was in bankruptcy proceedings.

But when both businessmen were released in October 2019, De Sousa returned to managing Indalo's media outlets until last May, when Cristóbal López replaced him and appointed Lisandro López as the day-to-day manager.