May Cristina Kirchner's courage in confronting media monopolies inspire Dilma.

There is a huge outcry in the Brazilian media against the government of Cristina Kirchner. Brazilian columnists celebrated "the end of her cycle" in Argentina after the results of Sunday's legislative elections.

But as today's cartoon in the Argentinian newspaper Página 12 showed: what a peculiar "defeat" it is when the government maintains a majority in Congress. Because that's what happened in Argentina.

And then, barely had the votes been counted, Cristina achieved one of her greatest victories as president, if not the greatest. The Supreme Court of Argentina approved the famous Media Law.

It is a law that combats monopolies and encourages plurality in the debates brought by the media.

The Clarín group – a sort of local Globo – fought against the law as much as it could. Their point – and anyone who believes them will believe anything – is that this legislation is against freedom of expression.

Lie.

The Clarín group can continue to say what it wants. It just won't have a monopoly on the voice. The court's decision ends the dispute: Clarín will have to divest part of its monstrous media portfolio.

Connections with Brazil are inevitable. How long will Globo continue to enjoy its abject monopoly, with which its three shareholders inherited the largest fortune in Brazil?

How long will the media continue to deny Brazilians, without any embarrassment whatsoever, plurality in debates?

Cristina Kirchner did something that neither Lula nor Dilma (at least not yet) dared to do: she confronted the media.

"Ah, the circumstances there are different," some will object. Yes, nothing is exactly the same in two countries. That's a truism. The real difference between the Argentinian case and the national case lies in Cristina's bravery in fighting the good fight.

In Brazil, for decades successive governments have shied away from dealing with the media. In a pathetic situation, news companies do not pay taxes on the paper they use to print their publications, whether newspapers or magazines.

Public funds are financing, through so-called "tax-exempt paper," extremely wealthy companies committed to perpetuating privileges that are harmful to society.

Another unbelievable perk is the market privilege enjoyed by the media, which talks so much about the importance of the free market.

In a relatively recent article published in Globo to defend the reservation, it was stated that soap operas are "national heritage," and therefore cannot be threatened by foreign competition. It was also said that there would be a risk of a Chinese broadcaster promoting Mao Zedong if established in Brazil.

The author of this beatific work is Luís Roberto Barroso, now a Supreme Court Justice, who at the time was a lawyer for Globo's lobbying organization, Abert.

How bad the unrestricted power of the media is for Brazil was spectacularly demonstrated in 1954 and 1964, when its owners openly conspired against elected governments and conducted campaigns in which the truth was the first victim.

Curiously, after coming to power with a grand slogan claiming that hope should overcome fear, the PT acted in the opposite way towards the media. Fear overcame hope.

Even toothless, even with plummeting ratings, even without winning a single election in many years, even with death threats online, Jornal Nacional continues to instill fear, or rather, terror, in PT (Workers' Party) administrations.

In Cristina Kirchner's case, hope was greater than fear, and the result is a historic achievement—not hers, not her government's—but Argentina's.