Ernestina Herrera de Noble

Ernestina Laura Herrera de Noble (7 June 1925 – 14 June 2017) was a prominent Argentine publisher and executive. She was the largest shareholder of the Grupo Clarín media conglomerate and director of the flagship Clarín newspaper. She was the first woman to become director of a mainstream newspaper in South America. The two maintained a sporadic relationship until Noble and his wife, Guadalupe Zapata, were divorced in the early 1960s. She and the publisher were married in 1967; Roberto Noble died of cancer on 12 January 1969. Despite its large circulation, however, Clarín suffered financial difficulties when Mrs. Noble inherited the director's post. She turned to one of the late Roberto Noble's most prominent allies, economist and wholesaler Rogelio Julio Frigerio, who lent Clarín US$10 million, in 1971. The paper continued to endorse Frigerio's centrist MID platform, which centered on government support for infrastructure investment and import substitution industrialization. On Frigerio's advice, Mrs. Noble brought in Héctor Magnetto, who took charge of the newspaper's finances.

Mrs. Noble was detained in December 2002 by order of Judge Roberto Marquevich following a lawsuit filed by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo alleging that the two infants she adopted in 1976, Marcela and Felipe, should submit DNA samples on the possibility that their biological parents may have been abducted by the last dictatorship during their Dirty War against dissidents. Her request to deny the samples was ruled in her favor in June 2008, though the case remains in litigation. On 17 October 2009, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner proposed the compulsory submission of DNA samples in cases related to crimes against humanity, in a move lauded by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, but excoriated by opposition figures as a political move against Mrs. Noble amid the controversies between Clarín and Kirchnerism that first arose in 2008.

Similar motives are alleged by the opposition against the presidentially sponsored Media Law, which would restrict the number of media licenses per proprietor and allocate a greater share of these to state and NGOs, thereby limiting the influence of the Clarín Group. The hitherto cordial relations between Mrs. Noble and Kirchnerism was further strained by a federal lawsuit filed by the executive branch alleging that the 1977 purchase of Papel Prensa had been illegally arranged. She was declared innocent in the Papel Prensa case in 2016.

Death She died on 14 June 2017, aged 92.