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THE FOURTH ESTATE

Buenos Aires. Callao and Rivadavia: “Noticias Gráficas!” “Crítica!”

And the whirlwind of the newsboy’s cries —dark, dark—,

that opens like a fan and invades the streets of the city:

Like a lance.

Like an arrow.

—José Portogalo, 1935

Nothing moves in a civilized nation if the printed press does not work. … The highest ideals, the most honorable aspirations for the common good have been sown, cultivated, and harvested through the columns of newspapers.

—La Nación, September 1, 1935

Disconcertingly well-stocked periodical kiosks crowded the sidewalks of mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, stuffed with the enormous variety of the morning’s fruits—the afternoon’s detritus—of Latin America’s largest publishing industry. With over seven hundred different Spanish-language newspapers and magazines together with sixty-seven dailies and periodicals in Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Armenian, Greek, German, and a host of other languages, all competing for readers’ attention, the sheer volume and variety of publications could easily overwhelm any curious pedestrian.¹ As two foreign journalists working at the English-language Buenos Aires Herald in the 1940s remarked, “the newsstands of Buenos Aires have for years offered a bewildering assortment of newspapers printed locally in such a babel of languages that I never did learn to recognize more than a third of them, let alone read them.”² Earlier visitors to the city like Georges Clemenceau and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez highlighted the technological complexity and wealth of the periodical press, proclaiming newspaper institutions like La Prensa and La Nación the embodiment of an obviously vibrant and optimistic Argentine modernity.³

The rise of the Buenos Aires press in the first decades of the twentieth century marks more than a simple quantitative expansion of publishing capacity. In Argentina, as in many other parts of the world, newspapers underwent a dramatic transformation from their roots in the partisan publications of the mid–nineteenth century to emerge as a qualitatively distinct new means of social communication. The twentieth-century press, though forged in the heat of the previous century’s political agitation, was shaped less by formal partisan disputes than by a rapidly expanding market of readers and advertisers. In this new world of commercial journalism, explicit identification with a specific, politically inscribed circle of readers acted less to guarantee an audience than to constrain a newspaper’s potential market. Overt partisan militancy increasingly ceded to “general interest” reporting and class-based cultural appeals in the ceaseless effort to attract what appeared an ever-expanding readership.

This transformation implied an important refashioning of the whole network of relationships that constituted the Buenos Aires press. Where partisan political engagement and journalism practice had been intimately intertwined in the nineteenth century, the proprietors and journalists of the new press professed their autonomy from the vagaries of explicit partisan interests and—most emphatically—state power. Drawing on the rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse market of readers and advertisers, the owners of the commercial press forged a new relationship not only between political society and the newspaper industry, but between individual newspapers and their readership. Press and public increasingly faced each other as commodities, their relationship driven less by partisan militancy than by the more mundane forces of market exchange. In the process, Argentina’s commercial newspapers became a particularly complex amalgam of journalistic types: the “objective” reporting of the independent press—independent of both state power and organized political factions—allegedly mirrored reality, while editorialists sought at once to reflect and shape the interests and opinions of Argentine society as a whole.⁴

At the same time, the institutional structure of the press increasingly reflected the general contours of the Argentine economy. Not only did newspaper production necessitate progressively greater investments in imported capital goods and inputs like technologically advanced rotary presses, newsprint, and ink, but the transformation of the press demanded a reworking of newspaper relations of production. In the Buenos Aires of the mid-1920s, the politician-proprietors of nineteenth-century journalism, who had founded newspapers as “combat posts” in the defense of private economic and political interests, had largely given way to journalistic entrepreneurs whose primary business interests sprang from the newspapers themselves. As the ranks of politician-proprietors ceded to newspaper capital proper, the press’s rapid economic development and increasing technological complexity, as well as the growing thematic diversity of newspaper content, demanded a corresponding expansion of the ranks of wage earners specialized in different aspects of newspaper composition, production, and distribution. By 1930, Argentina’s commercially insignificant partisan press of the nineteenth century had become an economically powerful, capital-intensive, newspaper industry employing thousands of wage-earning journalists, printers, managers, and distributors.

This emergence of a new kind of press carried with it a rising dissonance between idealized conceptions of the social role of journalism and the commercial practices of the modern Argentine newspaper industry. The press’s juridical bases centered upon an understanding of newspapers as vehicles of citizen participation in an idealized public sphere, with the press as a whole acting as a fourth estate alongside and balancing the other representative institutions of republican governance. This conception, firmly rooted in nineteenth-century liberalism, held the economics of newspaper operations as incidental. Indeed, newspapers had rarely proven profit-making ventures in the course of the nineteenth century, and economic self-sufficiency was usually as surprising as it was short-lived.⁵ Yet, by the 1920s, not only had newspaper proprietors begun to wring spectacular wealth from an activity that for ideological reasons lay beyond the margins of the Argentine commercial code, but the commercial transformation of the newspaper industry had left the relationship between the ideological bases of journalism practice, press-related jurisprudence, and the actual functioning of the newspaper industry increasingly strained. The multiple fissures that had begun to open in the Argentine newspaper industry in the course of this transformation were precisely what would fuel the press conflicts of the 1930s and, ultimately, of the Peronist years.

The Legal Environment of the Argentine Press

The ideological roots and legal precedents of Argentine journalism are tangled with ambiguities more pronounced and more complex than the dominant, romanticized view of national press history allows.⁶ Rather than marking an abrupt and total rupture with an emphatically statist colonial political philosophy, the initial moves to create what would become the Argentine national press retained crucial aspects of the previous views of the realm of state prerogative, and thus of the relationship between the state and the means by which information is created and distributed. Both the Argentine press and early press law necessarily emerged in a moment in which, as Jorge Myers has argued, “the principal ideological traditions that have shaped the political vocabularies of the twentieth century … had still not achieved a full crystallization.”⁷ Indeed, in the chaotic first years of the republic, ideological clarity often served only to limit the range of options open to those attempting to establish a new political order in the wake of the dissolution of the old. Even if the Constitution of 1853 created a more stable juridical basis for journalism practice, the charter also incorporated new elements of uncertainty. Not surprisingly, each of the multiple parties to twentieth-century press conflicts could find ample raw material and historical precedents for their arguments by invoking the nineteenth-century ideological, institutional, and juridical beginnings of the national press.

Based as much in the immediate political exigencies of national state formation as in the realm of private political expression, the Argentine press’s moment of birth embodies these profound ambiguities. While informational hand-copied gazetas circulated in Buenos Aires even before the city became the seat of a new viceroyalty in 1776, commercial print journalism began with the appearance in 1801 of El Telégrafo Mercantil, Rural, Político, Económico e Historiográfico del Río de la Plata.⁸ The first regular periodical of the republic, however, had its origins as an integral part of the nascent national state: at the behest of the ruling junta, the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres published its first issue under the direction of Mariano Moreno on June 7, 1811. Though the junta explicitly created the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres not as a vehicle of private expression but as the mouthpiece of a still fragile provisional government in the midst of the violently contentious process of breaking the colonial link and fashioning a new state, Argentine journalists have long held the paper’s appearance as the birth of the national press and Moreno as the nation’s first journalist.⁹ Invocations of Moreno as the archetype of the Argentine journalist thus carry with them a legacy with an equivocal relationship to the antistatist conceptions of journalism practice that would become hegemonic later in the century.

The junta decree that laid the juridical basis for national press law similarly maintained a degree of ambivalence between the realm of private prerogative and the public tasks of state formation. Still, well into the twentieth century newspaper editors would point to the first two articles of the junta decree of April 22, 1811, as establishing the press as outside the realm of legitimate state regulation:

Article 1. All bodies [organizations] and private persons of whatever condition and state they might be, have the freedom to write, print, and publish their political ideas, without need for any license, revision, or approval prior to publication, under the restrictions and responsibilities expressed in the present decree.

Article 2. All present press courts, as well as the censorship of political works prior to their publication, are hereby abolished.¹⁰

The decree declared the individual action of publishing at once a “barrier against arbitrary actions by those who govern,” a source of public education, and “the only path to arrive at knowledge of true public opinion.” In this way, the junta decree established a latitude of publishing freedom that broke the restrictions enforced by the Bourbon colonial regime and promoted a significant democratization of public debate regarding the formation of what would become the postcolonial state.

However, the same decree restricted in important ways this freedom of private citizens to publish. If the decree did not require authors to sign their articles, it did insist that publishers record the authors’ identity so they could be held accountable in case of denunciations for acts of libel and licentiousness, writings that contradicted “public decency and good customs,” and any other “abuse of freedom of the press.” Similarly, article 6 asserted the necessity of prior censorship by ecclesiastical authorities with regard to writings on religious topics, while other articles of the decree loosely prohibited the “abuse of freedom of the press” and the publication of writing that was libelous, licentious, or contrary to public decency. To enforce these elements, a “Supreme Junta of Censorship” with ecclesiastical participation, established by article 13 of the decree, stood ready to “assure freedom of the press and contain at the same time its abuse.”¹¹ Deán Gregorio Funes, author of the decree, justified these measures before the junta, explaining that “the liberty [libertad] to which the press has a right is not in favor of licentiousness [libertinaje] of thought.”¹²

Initial formulations of the juridical norms surrounding the Argentine press, then, embodied a blend of interpretations on the parameters of the press and the realm of state competence with regard to the circulation of information and opinion. On the one hand, the decree legally recognized the existence of a print public sphere, at once open to the participation of all residents of the rebellious territories and free from prior censorship.¹³ At the same time, however, the decree limited legitimate debate to “political ideas,” leaving discussion of questions of public morality open to official censorship and effectively ceding control over legal print debate on religious matters to the clergy precisely because of its vested interest in upholding certain aspects of Catholic doctrine. This latter element of the decree was hardly inconsequential, especially in an environment in which struggles over the nature and form of political authority as well as the rights and limits of republican citizenship—and thus also of the relationship between state and church—were becoming increasingly contentious.¹⁴ Essentially, even as the junta set the basis for a political press that could serve as a forum of political debate among an emerging political elite, it also retained the monitoring and regulation of the press within the legitimate realm of state and church activity. Not until 1821 and 1822, a decade after the junta’s initial decree, did authorities in the province of Buenos Aires enlarge the realm of the rights of private citizens to publish by enacting a set of laws affecting both the press and the process of secularization.¹⁵ The decree of April 1811 and its subsequent revisions thus stood together with the junta’s creation of the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres as an amalgam of disparate influences: the statist and Catholic legacy of Spanish colonial rule; emerging bourgeois conceptions of the separation of public and private rights; and the practical demands of erecting a new political order in the ashes of the old.¹⁶

If continued revisions of the April 1811 press decree reflected, for the most part, a trend toward expanding the legal latitude allowed in the press, they also represented a more pragmatic attempt to create a legal framework that authorities could actually enforce. This liberalization, however, proved short-lived. In May 1828, the Manuel Dorrego regime in the province of Buenos Aires sharply curtailed the right to “attack state religion” through the press and prohibited the use of satire to criticize the public actions and private “defects” of “any individual” under penalty of heavy fines.¹⁷ The rise of Juan Manuel de Rosas as governor of the province of Buenos Aires—with vast authority over both the province as well as the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata as a whole—only strengthened restrictions on the press. Indeed, while the Rosas dictatorship continued to allow some semblance of a public sphere, publishing became subject to increasingly tighter legal and de facto state and quasi-state control.¹⁸ The most vibrant press opposition to the Rosas regime, in fact, came from the journalism practice of writers who, like Domingo Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre, attacked the government from beyond the reach of the rosista state while in exile in Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia.¹⁹

Only the Unitario victory over Rosas at the battle of Caseros in 1852, together with the broader ascendancy of a more coherent political liberalism in the Río de la Plata and beyond, allowed a new and ultimately more stable juridical framework for the operation of the Argentine press. Delineating the relationship between state and press in a far clearer fashion than previous attempts, Argentine lawmakers devoted article 14 of the 1853 constitution to the question of public expression through the press, while the subsequent addition of article 32 in 1860 further limited the capacity of the federal government to impose restrictions on publishing activities. Together, articles 14 and 32 of the constitution addressed the positive and negative aspects of the ideal press-state relationship: article 14 stood as a positive definition of citizen rights with regard to publishing, while article 32 embodied a conception of the role of the press as necessarily free of state restriction.

Yet the drafters of the new constitution also attempted to reconcile a basic contradiction that Sarmiento himself had asserted plagued the functioning of the press in any republic: “without complete freedom of the press there can be neither liberty nor progress. But with it one can barely maintain public order.”²⁰ To address this, not only did the drafters of the constitution allow provincial authorities significant latitude in determining local press law, but in doing so they also unlinked the rights of individuals to publish from the broader laws restricting libel and other aspects of the content of expression. In drawing a distinction between the private prerogative of citizens to publish and the public right of individuals to be protected from certain kinds of written attacks, the drafters of the new constitution sought to strike a new balance between the operation of a highly politicized press and broader political stability.

Article 14 of the 1853 constitution established that “all inhabitants of the Confederation enjoy the following rights in conformity with the laws that regulate their exercise; that is: … to publish ideas through the press without prior censorship.”²¹ Based on the draft constitution of liberal ideologue Juan Bautista Alberdi in his Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina, the article guaranteed freedom of the press in its positive and universal sense: as a freedom for the expression of thought through the press, ostensibly open to use by all inhabitants of the republic regardless of citizenship, political affiliation, ethnicity, or gender. Article 32, added in 1860 as the province of Buenos Aires rejoined the Confederation, reinforced the terms of the earlier article by declaring that “the Federal Congress will not dictate laws that restrict the freedom of the press, nor establish federal jurisdiction over that freedom.”²² Born as a concession to inhabitants of the rebellious province who feared President Urquiza’s attempts to stifle the opposition press, article 32 defined press freedom in its negative form: as freedom from the dictates of state authorities. The Constitution of 1853 thus effectively placed press freedom in the realm of natural rights, both universally valid and prior to the constitution itself, while at the same time explicitly limiting the actions of the federal government with regard to the functioning of the press.

Still, while establishing the right of private individuals to exercise freedom of expression through the press, both articles contained ambiguities that helped shape the particular environment in which the Buenos Aires commercial press would grow. First, though article 14 declared the right to publish without prior censorship, it did so only “in conformity with the laws that regulate [its] exercise,” despite Alberdi’s more unequivocally antistatist inclinations.²³ Until the 1930s, for the most part, these laws remained restricted primarily to offenses stipulated in the Argentine Penal Code that might be committed through the press: calumnia (libel), injuria (insult), and desacato (contempt of a public official).²⁴ By holding the authors of published works answerable for offenses as subjective and murky as injuria and desacato, the qualifications drafted into article 14 thus established the possibility that press activity could, in fact, remain subject to legitimate state penal action despite constitutional prohibitions against prior censorship. As a result, the federal legal and legislative battles surrounding the press prior to the 1930s centered primarily upon the proper definitions and limits of violations of the Penal Code committed through the press.²⁵ The possibility of litigation for these offenses—and the concrete cases of such litigation—marked a clear and constant limit to the role of the press within the emerging Argentine public sphere.

Second, article 14 did not guarantee freedom of expression, but rather a more limited right to publish “through the press” without prior censorship. Article 32 would reinforce this by focusing explicitly on libertad de imprenta, perhaps most accurately translated as the medium-specific “freedom of print” or “freedom of the printing press.” The national constitution, then, did not endorse a blanket right of Argentines to express themselves by any means, and in this Argentine constitutional law remained consonant with that of countries like Chile, Switzerland, and Belgium.²⁶ Nor did the 1853 constitution establish the right of libertad de prensa (freedom of the press), with its institutional and ill-defined quasi-corporate connotations, even if that expression did come into common usage at least by the late nineteenth century. These issues transcended simple semantics and left newer media like radio, audio recording, and film in an indeterminate position vis-à-vis constitutional law by the time of their growing importance in the 1920s.²⁷

This qualification of the right of expression by means of the press, finally, reinforced a corollary to article 32: if the federal Congress could not dictate laws preempting the exercise of expression through the medium of print, provincial legislatures remained bound only by the provisions of article 14. The subsequent federalization of the Argentine capital in 1880, then, effectively established multiple juridical universes for the national press: one in each of the Argentine provinces, where article 14 and the various press laws of provincial legislatures held sway; and another in the sparsely populated, peripheral National Territories together with the densely populated Federal Capital (the city of Buenos Aires proper), which fell under the administration of the federal government. In the city of Buenos Aires, then, any moves toward state regulation of the press would effectively clash with the constitutional constraints of article 32, and restrictions on the press remained far more controversial and difficult to establish—provided that the affected parties and their allies were powerful enough to mount a legal challenge. As a result, provincial journalists often found opposition to the actions of local officials much more problematic than did journalists in the city of Buenos Aires, even in periods of “intervention,” or direct rule by the federal government. Small, usually Left and labor publications of the Argentine capital, on the other hand, often did not have the means for legal defense against closures and harassment of dubious constitutionality, nor could they easily recover economically from quasi-legal police-imposed suspensions.²⁸

The 1880 federalization of the city of Buenos Aires, by separating the nation’s most prosperous and populous city from the country’s most powerful province, effectively resolved many of the more contentious issues facing the federal nature and geographical balance of powers of the Argentine national state. With the relative subsiding of large-scale social conflict that the measure secured, the most pressing impediment to the rapid expansion of the Argentine economy receded. The subsequent economic boom, and the generation of unprecedented prosperity for many in the port city, provided an environment in which commercial newspapers could serve at once as catalysts and beneficiaries of an increasingly vibrant national economy.

At the same time, the creation of the Federal Capital also established a juridically and economically privileged territory for the emergence of the commercial press. The emergence and spectacular expansion of the Buenos Aires newspaper industry thus owes as much to a growing acceptance of the antistatist elements of Argentina’s liberal Constitution of 1853 as to the federalization of the national capital. This combination, coupled with the subsequent rise in the public influence of newspaper owners that it helped engender, allowed the negative interpretation of press freedom—as freedom from state regulation—to emerge as dominant, while the positive right of publication became increasingly displaced from private individuals to become a broader, quasi-corporatist, institutional right of “the press.” In the process, Buenos Aires newspapers themselves became integral elements of the liberal institutional and ideological hegemony that played such a crucial role in their emergence.²⁹ Indeed, it is the rupture of that hegemony in 1930, with the military coup of September serving as both catalyst and symptom, that would ultimately undermine the broad consensus that had developed regarding the ideal character of the Argentine press.

The Structural Transformation of the Argentine Press

The rapid expansion of the press in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in fact, came coupled with a marked change in the practical character of journalism practice and the nature of newspaper institutions. If the explicitly political and bitterly polemical writing of the anti-Rosista exiles served as the foundation for Argentine journalism in the wake of Caseros, it is this latter tradition of periodismo faccioso (factional journalism) that would eventually give birth to the nation’s modern commercial press.³⁰ Yet the dramatic economic and demographic changes of the Argentine fin de siècle entailed a quantitative and qualitative transformation of the Buenos Aires press that differentiated the twentieth-century commercial newspapers far more starkly from their predecessors. By the 1920s, a nineteenth-century press focused on partisan militancy had become Latin America’s largest commercial newspaper industry.

Indeed, the Argentine press in the years between the fall of Rosas in 1852 and the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 formed an integral part of the often violent confrontations over the final character of the Argentine state.³¹ More than a simple extension of political activity, the practice of journalism was intrinsically political, with the separation between time dedicated to writing and time dedicated to state activities determined less by individual interest than by fluctuations in a given faction’s access to state power. Thus, journalist-politicians like José Hernández viewed newspapers like El Nacional Argentino together with the ballot box as a single “battlefield,” and competition for readership as an appeal to the mobilizing potential of ideas. For Hernández, journalists simultaneously gave voice to and guided public opinion, while the journalist himself served as a kind of precursor to a more sophisticated political leader that had yet to appear unequivocally.³² Similarly, Bartolomé Mitre found in La Nación Argentina a “combat post” to defend his factional interests, and in journalism practice more generally a place for tactical retreat from more literal battlefields.³³

It is precisely out of this tradition of factional journalism that two of the twentieth century’s more important Argentine commercial newspapers emerged. Both La Prensa and La Nación had their origins in the final conflicts over the status of Buenos Aires and the nature of Argentine federalism. Yet both newspapers would survive and prosper well after those conflicts had subsided, in large measure due to their owners’ embrace of key elements of the less factious journalism of opinion and objective journalism models—models that, in many ways, presented themselves as historical possibilities only with the subsiding of those conflicts and the establishment of liberal hegemony.³⁴ This transition, together with the concomitant emergence of a market more than capable of economically sustaining a set of commercially oriented newspapers divorced from specific political factions, ushered in a period of journalism in Buenos Aires in which polemical stances became increasingly subordinate to newspaper business interests.³⁵

The commercial transformation of the Argentine press has received scant attention from historians precisely with regard to the newspaper that would become Latin America’s most economically powerful in the first half of the twentieth century: La Prensa. The appearance of La Prensa, founded by José C. Paz, on October 18, 1869, marked an important step in the creation of a new style of Argentine journalism. In the first issue, Paz immediately declared his intention to move beyond the practices of factional journalism to create a paper that would always maintain an “independence” from political factions, resting instead on a broader reading market. Rather than signaling a “mercantile motive,” Paz declared, La Prensa’s engagement with the market would remain restricted to that needed to allow the editors to “be genuine interpreters of public opinion.”³⁶ Indeed, even the layout of Paz’s paper, with its physical separation of opinion, information, and advertising, revealed a move to more general notions of the press as a vehicle of both commerce and expression.³⁷

Any embrace of the more modern journalism of opinion and “objective” journalism models continued to rest uneasily with the still prominent role that force played in the resolution of political disputes. This became clear with Paz’s participation in a rebellion against the presidential succession of Nicolás Avellaneda in 1874. Upon joining the rebellion, Paz decried the relative powerlessness of the press itself against the “political caudillos” dominating the country and suppressing “public opinion.” In this situation, Paz wrote, “the word of the press is impotent… . What should be done in this case? Honorable and patriotic journalism knows no other temperament than to trade the pen for the sword.”³⁸ Thus, despite the subsequent consolidation of La Prensa as the country’s premier commercial daily and preeminent example of the potential of new kinds of journalistic practices and institutions, this transition was neither immediate nor entirely unequivocal. As would become apparent in the course of the 1930s, the tradition of factional journalism never entirely vanished in Argentina, even if it did remain largely submerged beneath the commercial strategies of the major dailies.

Claims to economic independence for the paper, however, were more than mere assertions. Indeed, the Paz family newspaper established a market position that gave it an unprecedented autonomy vis-à-vis not just Argentine political society, but even the rural landed interests with which the paper’s editors continued to identify. If the Paz family maintained a broad identification of the national interest with that of the rural oligarchy, La Prensa’s exclusive control by a single family rather than a political faction made it at once unpredictable and more effective as a representative of the long-term interests of that class as a whole.

Perhaps just as strikingly, by the 1920s a La Prensa monopoly on classified advertising insulated the paper’s owners from economic dependence not just on any political faction or social class, but on any single group of business advertisers as well. These thousands of classified advertisements, which covered the first five to twelve pages of the newspaper, extended the public of La Prensa well beyond the upper-class and educated middle-class readership that editors almost exclusively addressed in the paper’s editorials.³⁹ La Prensa achieved an average circulation of over 250,000 copies daily in 1927, growing to over 380,000 daily and nearly 500,000 for the Sunday edition by 1946, while its pre–World War II record stood at 745,894 copies on January 1, 1935.⁴⁰ This rapid rise in circulation necessitated a division of labor and level of capital investment that was in stark contrast to the artisanal production of nineteenth-century newspapers. In fact, by early 1946 La Prensa employed 1,698 persons and had consumed twenty-six thousand tons of imported newsprint the previous year—the scarcity and high price of newsprint due to the world conflict notwithstanding.⁴¹ Despite the political troubles the paper faced in the subsequent Peronist years, its circulation only continued to climb and the ranks of journalists, printers, and other staff at the paper to swell.

The tremendous wealth generated by La Prensa brought with it a rearticulation not only of the relationships between newspapers, market, and political society, but of that between the Argentine press and foreign news organizations. Indeed, La Prensa even played a key role in changing the character of international news agencies. In January 1919, editor and proprietor Ezequiel Paz contracted the services of Scripps’s struggling United Press, which had only months earlier lost its contract with La Nación. When, six months later, the United Press—and thus La Prensa in Argentina—broke the story of the signing of the Versailles Treaty, Paz signed a full contract with the agency.⁴² La Prensa, which already maintained an extensive system of correspondents in Europe and Latin America, effectively merged its foreign service with that of the United Press. The paper began paying up to U.S. $550,000 per year to the news service, an amount that one former United Press journalist would later call “probably the largest sum of money that any newspaper in the world paid to any news-gathering organization.”⁴³ Extensive coverage of Italy and Spain for La Prensa—the countries of origin of the majority of Argentina’s immigrants—essentially acted as a subsidy to the expansion of the news service in Europe, since the detailed information and analysis gathered at Ezequiel Paz’s behest remained property of the United Press for subsequent distribution to the rest of the agency’s clients.⁴⁴ Paz’s demand that the service give special attention to the Arica-Tacna dispute between Chile and Peru in 1925 further boosted the fortunes of the agency, and by the end of the year the once struggling United Press served 95 percent of the business available on the continent.⁴⁵ This intertwining of the Argentine paper and the Washington-based United Press became extreme: between 1920 and 1930, La Prensa essentially underwrote the expansion of what would become one of the world’s more important news agencies, and the Paz family’s newspaper continued as the United Press’s single largest client until the paper’s expropriation in 1951.

Its high circulation made individual issues of La Prensa an integral if ephemeral part of the urban landscape, while the La Prensa building itself stood as an imposing monument not just to the wealth the paper generated but to the broader social, cultural, and political pretensions of the Paz family. Designed by Parisian-trained architects Alberto Gainza and Carlos Agote and finished in 1898, the large, ornate building stands on the Avenida de Mayo, the long avenue anchored on either end by the seats of the national Executive and the national Congress, respectively. Just meters from the Plaza de Mayo, the La Prensa building shares a common wall with the offices of the mayor of the Federal Capital. The building’s cupola held what would become the paper’s emblem: a three-thousand-kilogram French sculpture of an Argentine Marianne—the personification of the republican virtues of Reason and Liberty—standing with extended arms, carrying both a large lantern and a copy of La Prensa.⁴⁶ The spatial message of the Paz family is clear, and often found itself explicitly articulated in the pages of the paper: La Prensa stood as an equal and independent fourth branch of the Argentine state itself, illuminating and watching over the workings of the other branches.

Fig. 2

The La Prensa offices, 1938.

Fig. 3

Statue to be placed atop La Prensa offices.

In addition to housing La Prensa’s newsrooms, the building held an “Industrial Chemical Clinic” for agriculturists and merchants, medical and legal clinics open to the public, an extensive library, a restaurant, rooms for fencing and billiards, a theater, and a large banquet room.⁴⁷ Following his visit during the Argentine Centennial celebrations in 1910, former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau wrote,

The building is one of the sights of the city. Every department of the paper is lodged in a way that unites the most perfect of means to the end in view. Simplicity of background, a scrupulous cleanliness, comfort for every worker therein, with a highly specialized method that gathers together all the varied workers on the staff to direct them toward their final end and aim, namely, promptness and accuracy of news. With all this there are outside services, such as a dispensary, so complete it would need a specialist to catalogue it, and suites of apartments that are placed at the disposal of persons whom the Prensa considers worthy of honor. I confess that I thought less luxury in this part of the building would have been more to the taste of the poor distinguished men who are lodged there, since a comparison with their own modest homes would be wholly to the disadvantage of the latter.⁴⁸

La Prensa was the most technologically and stylistically modern of the Buenos Aires newspapers in the first decades of the century, and the paper’s building itself seemed to embody the promise of an unbounded, elegant, and self-confident Argentine modernity.

La Prensa’s closest journalistic peer also grew out of the tradition of factional journalism to become one of Latin America’s premier dailies, even if it did not attain the same degree of commercial success as the Paz family paper. On January 4, 1870, less than three months after the birth of La Prensa, La Nación appeared under the direction of former president of the republic Bartolomé Mitre. Although it had been preceded by La Nación Argentina, originally Mitrista but now the political mouthpiece of a competing faction of the Partido Liberal, Mitre announced that the new paper would differ from that paper in more than politics: the first issue of La Nación carried the subheading “A General Interest Newspaper,” proclaiming a break from the journalistic model of the partisan press and the embrace of a broader journalistic program.⁴⁹

With national unity at least provisionally secured and the bases of a stable political order emerging, Mitre ostensibly abandoned the overt factionalism of La Nación Argentina to place La Nación within the French model of journalism of opinion—as a supporter not of immediate and personal political interests, but as caretaker of the long-term stability of oligarchic liberalism. In the paper’s first editorial, “New Horizons,” Mitre wrote, “The great conflict has finished… . La Nación Argentina was a [means of] struggle. La Nación will be a [means of] propaganda… . . With the nationality founded it is necessary to propagate and defend those principles in which it is inspired, the institutions that are its basis, the guarantees that it has created for all, the practical ends it seeks, [and] the moral and material means that must be placed at the service of those ends.”⁵⁰ Yet, like La Prensa, La Nación remained tied to the political aspirations of its founder, who led the 1874 revolt against Avellaneda, and to those of its subsequent owner, Emilio Mitre, who headed the Mitrista Republican Party.⁵¹ Prior to the establishment of a broad consensus on the institutional arrangements of the Argentine state—achieved only in the years subsequent to the 1880 federalization of Buenos Aires—the broader political environment of the republic still seemed to militate against the emergence of the kind of journalism that both Mitre and Paz perhaps prematurely envisioned.

It was precisely the contentious nature of this continued practice of factional journalism that brought Socialist Party founder Juan B. Justo to leave the paper’s staff in 1896, later denouncing La Nación for “reserving its energy to defend the vileness of the Mitrista camarilla.”⁵² Not until Emilio Mitre’s death in 1909, in fact, did the directors of La Nación establish the paper’s autonomy from partisan and factional politics in a less ambiguous fashion. The moment proved ripe for such a move, as the series of electoral reforms that culminated with the expansion of effective suffrage under Roque Sáenz Peña in 1912 not only provided an alternative to insurrection for dissident sectors of the Argentine political class, but also signaled a broadening of that class itself.⁵³ In the new political environment, Jorge and Luís Mitre, the paper’s new coproprietors, quickly distanced La Nación from narrow partisan affiliation in order to extend the paper’s reach to this increasingly heterogeneous Argentine political class as a whole.

This transformation of La Nación from an organ of Mitrismo proved as successful as it was ambitious: resting on an expanding market of readers and advertisers, the Mitres positioned the family paper to act as a “tribunal of doctrine,” ostensibly impartial to the immediacies of partisan politics while maintaining a “political-pedagogical” mission directed at the entirety of the Argentine elite.⁵⁴ Under Jorge and Luís Mitre, then, editorialists at the paper publicly proclaimed their role as a sort of collective organic intellectual of the nation’s ruling class, pragmatically reworking the abstractions of liberal ideological principles in changing practical circumstances in order to guide the Argentine economic and political elite.⁵⁵ Rather than self-consciously occupying the “combat posts” of factional politics or viewing journalistic activity as a stepping-stone to concrete political action, the journalists at La Nación instead claimed that they could effectively, in the words of Ricardo Sidicaro, “view politics from above.” This rearticulation of the web of relationships between journalism practice, market, and state would situate the Mitre family paper as an effective ideological-institutional guardian of the long-term viability of an Argentine social order that had emerged from the export boom of 1880–1910.

Unlike La Prensa, with which it shared the same journalistic model and liberal-conservative orientation, and despite its greater ideological flexibility, La Nación did not attract an audience far beyond the upper-class and professionals addressed in its pages. It never reached the circulation levels of La Prensa, selling approximately 210,000 copies daily (317,500 on Sundays) by 1935 and, despite slowly increasing sales during World War II, finishing 1945 with an average circulation about 150,000 copies short of the Paz family’s newspaper.⁵⁶ Yet the inability of the Mitre family’s paper to match the growth of La Prensa—whose monopoly on classified advertising guaranteed an ever-increasing, multiclass readership—did not signal a commercial failure for La Nación: the paper still finished the war with the sixth-highest circulation in Latin America, outselling its nearest non-Argentine peer by 10,000 copies daily.⁵⁷ The contrast with La Prensa was also reflected in the comparative architectural modesty of the paper’s offices. While still close to the geographic center of national political power, the relatively staid offices of La Nación were several blocks away on San Martín Street, the heart of the country’s financial district, only moving to the commercial Florida Street in 1929.⁵⁸

If the phenomenal growth of La Prensa brought with it a particularly intimate relationship with the United Press, La Nación similarly became closely allied with a United States–based news organization. Jorge Mitre had originally signed a contract with the United Press in 1916 order to bypass the French news agency Havas, which held the rights to the South American market under the terms of the international wire service cartel. Mitre, however, attempted to expand his own news service in Latin America at the same time, and eventually broke his contract with the United Press in 1918 in a dispute over the ownership of collected information. The conflict between La Nación and the United Press worked to the detriment of the former, especially as La Prensa began to throw its economic weight behind the rapidly expanding agency. Mitre’s abandonment of the United Press in favor of the more established and powerful Associated Press thus linked La Nación with a news service less dependent upon the paper’s continued satisfaction, especially in comparison to the services rendered to La Prensa by United Press. Still, La Nación became the Associated Press’s gateway into the South American news market, and the offices of the Mitre family’s paper also served as the regional offices of the Associated Press. The relationship between La Nación and the Associated Press only grew more intimate in the wake of the formal dissolution of the wire service cartel in 1934—a process that the Argentine papers did much to facilitate.⁵⁹

Where La Prensa and La Nación represented the journalistic high-water mark of Argentina’s “serious” press in the first half of the twentieth century, the proprietor and journalists of the newspaper Crítica fervently embraced the whole range of possibilities that the medium of commercial journalism presented. Founded by the Uruguayan émigré Natalio Botana in September 1913, the evening paper dramatically changed the practice of journalism in the country, and its abrasive, sensationalistic character is as intimately linked to its historical moment of origin as the more staid, reasoned styles of the Paz and Mitre family newspapers are linked to their moments of origin. Within a decade of the paper’s founding, Botana himself also became the most spectacular and controversial example of a new social type: the journalistic entrepreneur, whose conspicuous wealth and enormous social influence flowed not from landed interests or political patronage, but from the practice of journalism itself.⁶⁰ Indeed, although La Prensa’s economic power and international stature were unrivaled among the Argentine press of the first half of the century, Crítica’s unique character, and the vast web of anecdote and legend surrounding Botana, still loom largest in the Argentine popular imagination.⁶¹ In quite unexpected ways, it was Botana’s great success in creating an aura around Crítica as the voice of the urban popular classes and embodiment of utopian aspirations for egalitarian democracy that placed the paper at the center of the many of the press conflicts after 1930.

The same national political opening that prompted Jorge and Luís Mitre to abandon the vestiges of La Nación’s entanglement with factional politics created much of the impetus for the founding of Crítica. Botana, a working journalist, launched the paper in the wake of the 1912 Sáenz Peña Law’s expansion of suffrage, a moment when national political life suddenly became significantly more relevant to a much larger section of the population.⁶² Crítica, Botana announced in the paper’s first issue, would “repudiate the old practice of the fourth power”—that is, the “petulant” use of journalism to advance the interests of a specific political faction—and instead would remain “without program, but with ideas.”⁶³ If the Mitre brothers sought to create in La Nación a forum of debate and guidance for the nation’s political class as a whole, Botana similarly intended to create an organ that would shape broad political worldviews. Unlike La Nación, with its self-conscious appeals to the nation’s political class, however, Crítica would engage the now effectively enfranchised and rapidly growing urban middle and working classes. Through Crítica, Botana sought to make the Argentine press—or at least his newspaper—a factor in the new age of mass politics. The direction he took implied a dramatically new journalistic style and set of journalism practices.

Yet the director’s intention of using the paper as the vehicle for organizing the urban popular classes into a base for a disparate array of conservative political forces left Crítica at a serious competitive disadvantage with respect to its already well-established conservative evening rival La Razón. The difficulty of success for Botana’s project only seemed confirmed as the Sáenz Peña Law resulted not in the unlikely scenario of mass affirmation of liberal-conservatism, but in the rather predictable ascent of the tremendously popular Radical Party leader Hipólito Yrigoyen to the presidency in 1916. As Sylvia Saítta has convincingly shown, the particular model of factional journalism that Botana initially sought to follow—ironically, one so eclectic and independent that it remained without the financial backing and guaranteed public of any organized political faction—simply did not generate the revenue needed to sustain a viable newspaper in what had become a capital-intensive and fiercely competitive industry.⁶⁴ That Botana adopted this strategy in the midst of the First World War, with its predictable spike in the price of imported newsprint, ink, and machinery, only aggravated the situation for the evening paper.⁶⁵

In the course of the 1920s, however—what one Crítica journalist called the paper’s “romantic period”—Botana transformed Crítica from a failing mouthpiece of “popular conservatism” into Latin America’s most widely read evening newspaper, and a stylistically innovative and politically influential daily.⁶⁶ Through shrill editorials, sensationalistic crime investigations, a heavy emphasis on graphic material, and the latest and most complete sports reporting, Botana reshaped the newspaper to capture readers among ever-increasing sectors of the population.⁶⁷ The pages of Crítica also became a vehicle of ceaseless self-promotion, in which the paper’s journalists proclaimed Crítica and its young, bohemian journalists—the “muchachada de Crítica”—central protagonists in the very news the paper carried. Natalio Botana held no pretension of dispassionately viewing “politics from above,” while Crítica reporters proudly rejected the model of an objective journalism divorced from the subjectivity of the journalist.⁶⁸ Political opinions, cultural assertions, and open subjective biases thus dramatically shaped the paper’s format, appearance, and content. Indeed, not until the mid-1930s—well beyond the period of Saítta’s study—did Crítica regularly carry a separate “opinion” section, and even then commentary remained interspersed throughout the paper’s articles and graphic materials. Combined with a new commitment to the speed of news reporting, this strategy proved remarkably successful: by the middle of the 1920s Crítica had surpassed the circulation of its evening rival La Razón to become the third most widely read paper in Argentina.⁶⁹ By decade’s end, Crítica had ceased its frequent moves around the city and established itself, with the most powerful rotary presses, in a suitably modern Art Deco building on the country’s passageway of political power, the Avenida de Mayo, and its circulation had exceeded that of La Nación, behind only La Prensa.⁷⁰

The tremendous influence of Crítica, its sensationalist style, and its economic success have given Natalio Botana’s paper a presence bordering on the mythical in the Argentine popular memory. The figure of the Citizen Kane–like Botana himself also continues to hold a particular place in memories of the 1920s and 1930s, maintained by the anecdotes and memoirs of numerous Crítica journalists as well as the thinly disguised Botana character in Leopoldo Marechal’s epic novel Adán Buenosayres.⁷¹ Regardless of the veracity of stories of Botana’s use of Crítica as a tool for extortion (of matchmakers who did not include the correct number of matches in each box, or breweries whose product was over 95 percent water), the image of Botana as a flamboyant and powerful man circulated widely. That the Crítica owner had managed to expand his power to include other media only increased the sense of that power: where other film studios could threaten to withhold advertising from newspapers as a means of ensuring favorable reviews, the Botana-owned Baires Film studio had the added recourse of Crítica crusades against competitors who printed “questionable” criticism of its films. Such tactics seem to have ensured the critical acclaim of the studio’s releases—as well as bolstered Botana’s self-cultivated reputation as a local blend of Hearst and Al Capone.⁷²

Botana’s mansion in Don Torcuato, just outside the Federal Capital, resembled that of a younger, more avant-garde Hearst; it included a spectacular mural by Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.⁷³ The reaction of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who visited Don Torcuato with Federico García Lorca, is typical of the mix of fascination and unease that the aura surrounding Botana and his newspaper inspired:

We were invited one evening by a millionaire like those that only Argentina or the United States could produce. This was a rebellious and self-taught man who had made a fabulous fortune with a sensationalist newspaper. His house, surrounded by a tremendous park, was the incarnation of the dreams of a vibrant nouveau riche. Hundreds of cages of pheasants of all colors and all countries bordered the road. The library was filled only with extremely old books that he bought by cable in the auctions of European book collectors and was large and full. But more spectacular was that the floor of this enormous reading room was covered totally with panther furs sown together to form a gigantic cover. I knew that the man had agents in Africa, Asia, and the Amazon destined exclusively to collect the skins of leopards, ocelots, phenomenal cats, whose spots now shone under my feet in the ostentatious library… . This is how things were in the house of the famous Natalio Botana, powerful capitalist, who dominated public opinion in Buenos Aires.⁷⁴

With the emergence of Crítica, the Buenos Aires press completed its transformation into a powerful commercial newspaper industry, and it was Botana the journalistic entrepreneur—the embodiment of capital—who most spectacularly and unequivocally replaced the politician-proprietors of the nineteenth-century model of the press.

The establishment and evolution of La Prensa, La Nación, and Crítica exemplify the complexity and journalistic variety in the structural transformation of the Argentine press from the modest economies of newspapers dedicated to the practices of factional journalism to the modern commercial press. Yet a host of other dailies also successfully competed for readership in Buenos Aires. Some of them would at times exceed La Prensa, La Nación, and Crítica in sales, but only occasionally would any surpass any of the three major dailies in influence or independent economic clout.

Of the major dailies, perhaps none suffered as many shifts in ownership and orientation prior to the crises of the 1930s and 1940s as La Razón. Founded in 1905 by Emilio B. Morales as a commercial newspaper independent of the nation’s political factions, La Razón was the nation’s leading evening newspaper until its eclipse by Crítica in the early 1920s. Morales sold the newspaper to the conservative journalist José A. Cortejarena in 1911, and after Cortejarena’s death the paper became the property of his widow, Helvecia Antonini, who delegated the direction of La Razón to a host of different journalists and administrators. This instability in the newspaper’s top management lent La Razón an increasingly amorphous market identity precisely as Natalio Botana consolidated that of Crítica, eroding at once La Razón’s base readership and its financial viability. By 1935 La Razón’s daily circulation stood at only 81,000—still large by contemporary Latin American standards, but a fraction of the over 250,000 copies of Crítica that porteños purchased each afternoon.⁷⁵ Ironically, the financial weakness of La Razón ultimately made the paper exceedingly valuable in the 1930s. The paper’s sudden reemergence by the end of the decade reveals not only the degree to which the Argentine commercial press had become independent of state power and political factions in the previous decades, but just how decisive—and lucrative—the rearticulation of the relationship between state and press could prove.

On May 14, 1928, Buenos Aires’ first tabloid-sized daily appeared. Founded by the English immigrant Alberto Haynes, who had lain the foundations of the multimedia empire Editorial Haynes with the magazine El Hogar Argentino in the first years of the century, El Mundo had an immediate impact on journalistic practices in Buenos Aires.⁷⁶ The physical size of the paper made it easier to read on the rapidly growing city’s crowded public transportation. Under the guiding principle that “what is good, if brief, is twice as good,” El Mundo carried national and international news stories synthesized in clear, simple articles, while editorials also remained short.⁷⁷ Reporting and editorials also tended to mask any political sympathies in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible—El Mundo was, a frequent heading to its inside pages proclaimed, “the newspaper that aspires to be read in all homes.” The paper carried a variety of sections: theater, international news, film, literature, the lottery, “for women and the home,” and for children. Instead of the haphazard arrangement of the equally diverse content of Crítica, however, El Mundo readers found well-organized, consistently placed thematic sections. El Mundo became successful immediately, with daily circulation climbing to over 200,000 by 1935 and increasing by another 100,000 before the end of World War II.⁷⁸ While Crítica’s rise came at the cost of La Razón, however, the growth of El Mundo had a very different impact on the newspaper landscape: with a price of five centavos—half that of the other major dailies—the Haynes paper tended less to draw readers away from the established press than to entice new ones or those who bought it as an additional paper. As a result, El Mundo generally escaped the kind of internecine polemics that permeated much of the popular press.

Among the major Argentine newspapers only Noticias Gráficas emerged directly from within the multiple crises unleashed in the 1930s. The paper (in its first month called simply Noticias) appeared on June 10, 1931, as an attempt by La Nación’s Jorge Mitre to occupy the gap in the evening market left by the suspension of Crítica after the military coup of September 6, 1930. At first a tabloid largely in the style of El Mundo, the paper benefited from conflicts within the administration and newsroom of the “new” evening paper Jornada, a thinly disguised Crítica surrogate. Alberto Cordone, director of Jornada/Crítica during Natalio Botana’s exile in Uruguay, joined the staff of Noticias Gráficas in September of 1931, bringing with him thirty colleagues.⁷⁹ Noticias Gráficas quickly adopted the format of Crítica virtually in its entirety. The resurrection of Crítica proper in February 1932, however, placed serious strains on Noticias Gráficas, as increased competition in the newspaper marketplace together with strong attacks from the pages of Crítica eroded Noticias Gráficas’s readership. Despite renouncing his post at La Nación in favor of his brother Luís, Jorge Mitre failed to create a newspaper financially independent of La Nación. Through much of the decade Jorge Mitre continued to pass Noticias Gráficas’s bills for electricity, rent, newsprint, and other expenses to La Nación—much to the dismay of the morning paper’s shareholders.⁸⁰ Businessman José Agusti finally rescued the paper from complete financial collapse in 1938 and remained as the proprietor and director of Noticias Gráficas until the daily came under Perón’s control in 1947. If Noticias Gráficas remained financially precarious for the entirety of its existence, its circulation nonetheless rivaled that of Crítica: in 1935 the paper’s three daily editions averaged 250,000 copies, and 270,000 copies in 1945.⁸¹

The federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 inaugurated a transformation of the city’s press unrivaled within Latin America, a process that only accelerated with the expansion of suffrage via the electoral reforms of 1912. Argentines were already among the world’s greater per capita consumers of newspapers, and the rapid growth and prosperity of Buenos Aires would make it exceptional in absolute terms as well. In 1928, the only three Latin American newspapers that consistently maintained daily circulation in excess of 150,000 copies were published there: La Prensa, Crítica, and La Nación.⁸² Even La Razón, battered by competition from Crítica for evening readers, outsold its nearest non-Argentine peer, Río de Janeiro’s A Nôite, by 10,000 issues daily.⁸³ The gap only widened as the world economic crisis of the 1930s pushed still more Argentines into the Federal Capital and surrounding suburbs. By 1935, the city of Buenos Aires boasted just under 2.5 million inhabitants and had five daily newspapers—Crítica, Noticias Gráficas, La Prensa, La Nación, and El Mundo—each consistently selling well over 200,000 copies daily. Outside of Buenos Aires, only A Nôite maintained that circulation level. The total circulation of Buenos Aires dailies exceeded that of both Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.⁸⁴ On the eve of the February 1946 elections that brought Perón to the presidency, the Buenos Aires newspaper market stood at nearly triple that of its nearest Latin American peer, Mexico City, with the city’s residents purchasing more newspapers than those of Río de Janeiro, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City combined.⁸²

By the late 1920s the emergence of the commercial press had created a set of institutions that far exceeded in economic complexity and wealth anything that the drafters of the 1853 constitution might have imagined. The Argentine press of the nineteenth century, rooted in a tradition of factional political conflict and intimately tied to those wielding or aspiring to wield state power, had become something quite different: a capital-intensive, technologically advanced, and market-dependent commercial newspaper industry with millions of readers.

The Press as Newspaper Industry

The rapid expansion of the press in the early twentieth century not only created a quantitatively distinct set of institutions, it also engendered a profound qualitative shift in the nature and social significance of journalism. The press’s divergence from the model of factional journalism signaled a new relationship between individual newspapers and the public, one mediated by the market and in which political affinity receded in importance in favor of a broader set of appeals to potential readers. The growth of a newspaper market also carried with it a significant change in the relationship between political society and the press: by the 1920s, the owners of the nation’s premier newspapers had become largely autonomous from the factional politics and even the social classes that marked their origins. At the same time, the industrialization of the press demanded a rearticulation of newspaper relations of production, with the hand-cranked printing presses manned by nineteenth-century politician-journalists giving way to enormous mechanized rotary presses under the guidance of wage-earning printers producing the texts of increasingly specialized working journalists. More than the development of a new style of journalism, then, the emergence of the commercial press implied a profound reworking of the press’s entire network of relationships.

Where political militancy linked reader and newspaper in the tradition of factional journalism, the relationship between the commercial press and the public was mediated by a more complex amalgam of factors. By the 1920s, the appeal of the most widely read newspapers of the Argentine Republic lay less in explicitly polemical political and economic journalism that addressed the concerns of an audience segmented by partisan militancy than in more general reporting and editorials that engaged the political, work, sport, leisure, social, and cultural concerns of increasingly broad sectors of the population. Sensationalism, melodrama, and the incorporation of photographs and other graphic material in the daily press sought the attention of popular-class readers, while the physical layout and page size of newspapers like El Mundo facilitated the incorporation of reading into the routine of the urban middle- and working-class daily commute.⁸⁶ In the place of specific factional sympathy, then, a more stable—and more sweeping—set of political, class, gender, cultural, and ethnic markers grew in prominence as newspaper directors aimed at generating a committed readership.

The factional newspaper’s role as public forum for partisan debate also increasingly ceded space to a more powerful form of publicity. If Argentines together consumed far more newspapers than their regional peers in the first half of the twentieth century, those living in the Argentine capital also absorbed greater quantities of a much more sophisticated set of classified and display advertising. Not only were residents of the Argentine capital considerably wealthier and more literate on average than other Latin Americans in the first half of the century, but a 1920 U.S. Department of Commerce study declared Buenos Aires “an oasis in the advertising desert” and “so far in advance of all other cities of South America in advertising development as to be in a class by itself.”⁸⁷ Exposure to classified and display advertising became an integral and unavoidable part of the newspaper reading experience, in effect “educating” readers as consumers and producers even as it served as a conduit for the incorporation of consumer demands into the market.⁸⁸ Commercial publicity—the “poetry of Modernity,” in the words of Henri Lefebvre—together with the breadth of newspaper reporting thus helped shape the city’s rapid economic transformation in the first decades of the century.⁸⁹

Such changes signaled a fundamental shift in the practical nature of the relationship between press and public. Where nineteenth-century factional newspapers had ideally served as participatory media for communication among political militants, the scale of the twentieth-century commercial press placed newspapers before the public less as an accessible forum for expression than as an item of consumption. Similarly, even as press owners competed to sell ever-increasing numbers of newspapers to a growing public, they also competed to sell advertising space to businesses. With the relationship between press and public increasingly mediated not by political exchange but by market exchange, the practice of journalism assumed an additional role that press critics would soon declare threatened to overwhelm all others: that of delivering the attention of consumers to the goods and services offered by businesses. The press by no means ceased to serve as a forum of public debate; the penetration of the commodity form in the relationship between newspaper and reader, however, placed expression through the press in a new key.

The technological imperative imposed by this fiercely competitive newspaper market also fundamentally changed the character of press production techniques, and with it the relations of production within the newspaper industry. Where José C. Paz and Cosme Mariño printed the first issue of La Prensa themselves with a hand-driven rotary press, by 1935 the paper’s 1,050-horsepower presses stood two stories high and forty-six meters long.⁹⁰ Crítica updated its presses to the latest Hoe Superspeed upon Botana’s transfer of the paper’s facilities to Avenida de Mayo 1333. In singular Crítica fashion, the paper’s journalists boasted that the extraordinary publishing capacity of the machine more than compensated for the nearly year-long process of its assembly: “with a single hour of continuous publishing the Hoe rotary can encircle the city in a belt of newspapers.”⁹¹ In a poem dedicated to the new rotary, poet and Crítica journalist Raúl González Tuñón even found inspiration in its seemingly boundless technological modernity, proclaiming it a “song of steel” and “the heart of Buenos Aires.”⁹² El Mundo and the other major newspapers of the city maintained similar installations. For newspaper proprietors, access to capital goods and industrial inputs of ever-increasing cost and sophistication was not only an indicator of the power and progressive nature of their papers; it proved absolutely essential to the survival of their enterprises.

Fig. 4

Printer at a Hoe printing press, November 1941.

Fig. 5

Printers at work in La Prensa, October 1924.

This industrialization of the newspaper production process implied not only the growing complexity of the press’s division of labor, but the emergence of capitalist relations of production—and class conflict—in the newspaper industry. Prior to the establishment of La Prensa and La Nación, printers had already begun the process of unionization, eventually creating the Federación Gráfica Bonaerense (FGB) for the typographers of the Federal Capital and Greater Buenos Aires in 1907. By 1922, when members of the Argentine Socialist Party gained effective control of the union, the FGB maintained a strong presence among the 350 printers employed with La Prensa, and had made inroads at the other major dailies as well.⁹³ Similarly, news vendors (popularly called canillitas) unionized in 1920 as the Federación de Vendedores de Diarios.⁹⁴ Less than two years later, the canillitas mounted a bitter strike against La Razón, which only hastened the decline of the evening paper. After the first canillita death at the hands of strikebreakers from the right-wing Liga Patriótica, Botana confidante Eduardo “El Diente” Dughera organized protective caravans to cover vendors in what had become a virtual war among evening newspaper distribution networks.⁹⁵ When the strike ended nearly ten months later, not only had the vendors’ union achieved broad recognition, but Crítica had emerged as the country’s dominant evening paper and “El Diente” had become the “undisputed boss” of what remained the dangerous business of newspaper sales.⁹⁶

Fig. 6

News vendors prepare El Mundo for distribution, mid-1930s.

The emergence of the commercial press also profoundly altered the relationship between proprietors and journalists, and between Argentine intellectuals and the market. Where politician-journalist-proprietors of the nineteenth-century press like Bartolomé Mitre had given way to journalism entrepreneurs like Natalio Botana, the newsroom itself also became filled with wage earners. In an environment of growing demand for texts of all kinds, the commodification of journalism practice, as Ángel Rama has observed, allowed intellectuals far greater latitude in their relationship to state power and political factions.⁹⁷ It did, however, subordinate many of them to the demands of newspaper proprietors and the commercial logical of the newspaper industry. If Martín Fierro author José Hernández, in the era of factional journalism, had viewed the journalist as a “precursor to the political leader,” by the 1920s journalism had become an activity that at best could serve as a source of inspiration, avenue of opportunity, and economic subsidy for writers and artists; at worst, newspapers simply provided a meager paycheck in exchange for long hours and the subordination of writing to the demands of editors and the whims of the market.⁹⁸

Indeed, the enormous success of many dailies depended in great measure upon the array of truly impressive literary talent that gravitated toward the practice of journalism. Many of Argentina’s most important writers of the 1920s and 1930s came to work for Botana’s Crítica, including Jorge Luís Borges, Roberto Arlt, Raúl and Enrique González Tuñón, Leopoldo Marechal, Edmundo Guibourg, Ulyses Petit de Murat, and Pablo Rojas Paz. Borges’s direction of Crítica’s Revista Multicolor de los Sábados in 1933 and 1934, a brief but memorable period, also made the sensationalist daily a literary rival of La Nación: in addition to the writings of Borges, Petit de Murat, Enrique González Tuñón, and Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, the supplement carried Borges’s translations of international figures like O. Henry, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.⁹⁹ Similarly, Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío reached his fame while writing for La Nación, the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí served as a correspondent at the paper from 1882 to 1891, and novelist Eduardo Mallea directed La Nación’s literary supplement in the 1930s and 1940s.¹⁰⁰ Even the editorial writing that appeared in the paper tended to better that of La Prensa in expressive quality and intellectual subtlety, and La Nación at different times boasted regular editorialists of the caliber (and disparate political views) of Joaquín V. González, Leopoldo Lugones, and Alberto Gerchunoff.¹⁰¹

Despite the glorification of the bohemian lives of journalists in the course of the 1920s—especially those of the literary figures associated with Crítica—the newsroom was a place of long hours and generally poor pay. In his memoirs of his time at Botana’s newspaper, Roberto Tálice, who joined the paper, like many of his colleagues, while in his mid-teens, recounts that not only did his wages cover a small room in a boardinghouse and little more, but “Crítica has made us into fakirs.” Tálice even credited the omnipresence of drug use among the paper’s journalists less to bohemian experimentation than to the more pragmatic demands of their work routine: “Although it pains me to recognize it,” Tálice would later write, “many attribute the miracle of such great resistance to sleep and alcohol to the little envelopes of cocaine, sometimes vials, containing a gram dose of the purest Merk.”¹⁰²

The experience of Tálice, as well as that of other journalists, embodies a profound shift in the nature of writing as a social practice. The commodification of journalistic labor, though less stark than that of printers’ and newspaper vendors’ labor, rested uneasily with the cultural nature not just of the poetry, short stories, and novels of newspaper employees like Raúl González Tuñón, Jorge Luís Borges, and Roberto Arlt, but with the content of newspapers themselves. In his 1933 Radiografía de la pampa, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada denounced the particular form that the commodification of writing took within the newspaper industry, where authors became subject to the commercial demands of advertisers and found their individual expression brutally subsumed within the collective enterprise of the newsroom. Little remedy existed for the situation, however, since “having nothing to eat is worse… . Those intellectuals free of the politics of the press businesses are destroyed at the root.”¹⁰³ Novelist Leopoldo Marechal, even more dramatically, evokes the merging of anonymous journalistic labor with the machinery of industrial newspaper production in the “journalists’ hell” of the imaginary city of Cacodelphia. There, in a printing room inspired by the author’s time at Crítica and El Mundo, journalists jump headlong into the rotary presses, only to have the machines crush, print, fold, and “vomit” them as hybrid, commodified newspaper men (hombres-diario).¹⁰⁴ Even the paper’s “man on the street” readers could not escape the alienation that formed an integral part of the commercial newspaper industry, with “ten pages full of ignominy” consuming leisure time better dedicated to family and introspection.¹⁰⁵

Still, the division of labor in the newsroom and the commodification of journalism practice remained more ambiguous than the broader class divisions in the newspaper industry as a whole. Rather than forming independent trade unions, journalists in the city of Buenos Aires formed the mutual aid society Círculo de la Prensa in 1896, with La Nación founder Bartolomé Mitre himself serving as first president.¹⁰⁶ For decades the Círculo remained under the explicit tutelage of newspaper proprietors: Ezequiel Paz of La Prensa and Luís Mitre of La Nación alternated in the presidency of the organization until the 1920s, when they ceded to an alternation of their respective paper’s editors and administrators.¹⁰⁷ In addition to providing health, unemployment, and burial benefits to members, the organization served as an effective lobbying organization for the corporate interests of the newspaper industry. Thus, not only did the Círculo de la Prensa act as a watchdog regarding press issues—which, until the 1930s, remained largely confined to denunciations of censorship and harassment outside the Federal Capital—but the group pushed for greater professionalization and training among journalists.¹⁰⁸ This latter project bore fruit under the aegis of the Universidad Nacional de la Plata and the Círculo’s sister organization, the Círculo de Periodistas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, with the founding of the country’s first formal journalism school in 1935.¹⁰⁹

This dual push toward the independence of commercial newspapers from factional politics and the professionalization of journalism practice, however uneven it remained, corresponded to a substantive shift in the journalistic philosophy of owners of the “serious” press. Ezequiel Paz of La Prensa most forcefully articulated the characteristics of an objective journalism model, which declared accuracy of information, the absence of journalists’ subjectivity, and the clear separation of fact and opinion as the hallmarks of a proper press: “To inform with exactitude and truth; to omit nothing which the public has a right to know; to use always an impersonal and cultured form [of address] without prejudice to the severity and force of critical thought; to abandon rumor … to affirm only that which one has firm conviction from proof or documentation.”¹¹⁰ Similarly, journalists should remain vigilant about the insertion of opinion into reporting; otherwise they would “invade” the territory—physically demarcated in the pages of the paper—of opinion-driven editorials.¹¹¹ Together with the sharp distance from formal state imperatives guaranteed by the Argentine constitution, the pages of the press would provide the necessary information through which ordinary citizens might judge the acts of government.¹¹²

Where adherence to this objectivist model of journalism reinforced the market relationship between press and public by emphasizing the consumption of accurate information as a right of citizenship, Paz maintained an equivocal stance with regard to the editorial pages of La Prensa. “The daily press,” Paz argued in 1920, “must represent public opinion.” Yet Paz continued with an important qualification: “public opinion is the general criterion in exercise of the right to judge, as much of the result as of the appropriateness of the management of issues of common order.” Public opinion depended upon a rationality, “impartiality, serenity, and culture” that the La Prensa owner maintained stood above “the rough vocabulary of the working-class neighborhood [arrabal], which pretends to be democratic, but is nothing more than the result of intransigence and ignorance.”¹¹³ Two decades later, Ángel Bohigas, vice-director of La Nación, similarly argued against the validity of the press’s direct appeals to a popular readership, since “the journalist should try to make his page get to the thinking classes of the country, to those who carry greater weight in the elucidation of affairs of public interest.”¹¹⁴ Through the “healthy civic propaganda” of La Prensa’s editorial pages and La Nación’s “elevated mental level,” the owners and directors of the “serious press” explicitly sought to shape public opinion, an aim that stood in tension with similarly explicit assertions of the press as a virtually unmediated expression of the broader opinion, elevated or not, of the general public.¹¹⁵ Similarly, Ezequiel Paz’s claims that the press represented public opinion as a whole rested uneasily with Paz’s simultaneous dismissal of the subjective views of working-class readers.

The proprietors and editors of La Prensa and La Nación—and, by extension, the leadership of the Círculo de la Prensa—embraced a vision of the press and the social role of journalism firmly rooted in nineteenth-century liberalism, but with important modifications. In this libertarian conception of the press, the negative aspects of press freedom as enshrined in the Argentine constitution—in which the press would remain free from state interference—received special emphasis; like their counterparts in the United States and Britain, proponents of the “serious press” repeatedly elevated the press as “a ‘Fourth Estate’ in the government process.”¹¹⁶ Yet, in its positive aspects, the conception of press freedom articulated by the proprietors of La Prensa and La Nación had undergone a crucial transformation. In both cases, the constitutional principle of the right of publication as a component of citizenship remained rhetorically powerful even as the scale of the commercial press—and the scale of the polity—eroded the practical possibilities of a universally participatory daily press. The rights of citizenship through the press instead increasingly centered upon the public’s information consumption, with the ideal of the “informed citizen” largely eclipsing notions of the universality of rights of expression. As a consequence, the accuracy and impartiality of information together with claims to represent public opinion faithfully—however ambiguous they remained alongside Ezequiel Paz’s exclusionary, class-based qualifications—became pivotal elements of legitimacy for the “serious press.”

Of the major Argentine dailies in existence prior to 1930, Crítica diverged most markedly from this journalistic model. The name of the paper and the slogan below its masthead—“God set me upon your city like a horsefly on a noble horse, to bite it and keep it awake. (Socrates)”—announced a sharp watchdog role for Botana’s newspaper, and the constant campaigns against certain public figures served in good measure to reinforce that perception. Yet the cult around the paper and its bohemian “gang of boys” (muchachada) exalted the notion of the journalist and newspaper that found little common ground with the ideals set forth by Ezequiel Paz. On the contrary, not only did Crítica journalists self-consciously portray themselves as committed and active participants in the news they were reporting, but, as often as possible, Crítica and its journalists were the news itself.¹¹⁷ Botana and his staff similarly sought to create a relationship, even a complicity, between reader and paper based not on rationality and appeals to elite culture, but on an emotional identification of Crítica and its journalists with the culture, poverty, and language of the urban popular classes. More than a newspaper, Crítica was “the hand for the fallen, the support for the widow and the orphan, the paternal hand for children, and the defender of the innocent.”¹¹⁸

If Ezequiel Paz could claim La Prensa as a faithful representative of public opinion only by dismissing as irrelevant the language and interests of a significant portion of that public, Botana sought discursively to dissolve the boundaries between Crítica and the very public Paz discarded. In reassuring readers that commercial success would not change their “friendship,” the journalists at Crítica went beyond asserting that they “thought with the mind of the people” to cultivate an affective identification between the paper and the urban popular classes.¹¹⁹ Upon the move to Avenida de Mayo 1333, the paper’s journalists blurred any substantive distinction between the popular reading public and what had become a significant commercial enterprise: “If at some time you need the loyal advice or help of a friend, come to CRITICA as if to a common home, assured that the doors of our house will only be closed to domination, abuse or injustice. Reader and newspaper, we form, in sum, a single thing: an immense journalistic entity that lives of the people and for the people and in which thousands and thousands of men collaborate. Consider yourself a kind of ‘shareholder’ in this singular Sociedad Anónima Popular that is CRITICA.”¹²⁰ Where the proprietors and directors of La Prensa and La Nación viewed their papers largely as shapers of elite opinion and dispensers of the information needed for the proper practice of individual citizenship, Botana upped the ante: Crítica’s legitimacy rested upon assertions that it was nothing less than the voice, the democratic embodiment—as chaotic as that might prove—of the urban popular classes in the public sphere.

The Coming Crisis

This notion of Crítica as an expression of the collective citizenship of the urban popular classes represented a particular—and particularly lucrative—solution to a fundamental dissonance that the industrialization of the press and the concomitant expansion of political participation had created: by the 1920s what the press was had shifted dramatically; notions of what the press should be had changed little. On the one hand, the set of relationships between journalists, newspapers, and public had become increasingly mediated by commercial exchange rather than participation and representation, while the very scale and capital-intensive nature of the Buenos Aires newspaper industry exceeded what nineteenth-century Argentine liberals might have conceived. On the other, the underlying ideological and juridical bases of journalism practice had remained centered upon a conception of the press as the privileged forum for the public expression of opinion. How could Argentines exercise their rights of expression through the press in a socially meaningful way if the means to do so remained beyond their reach? Could the affective bonds between Crítica and its audience and the supposedly rational link between the so-called serious press and its public effectively create a truly representative public sphere? Did the rights of citizenship in relation to the press rest solely upon the right to consume accurate information? In short, who embodied the rights of the press: journalists, proprietors, or members of the public?

Yet self-proclamations of Botana’s paper as the collective voice of Argentine workers rested on more than the pervasive use of the underworld lunfardo dialect in the pages of the paper, the distribution of sewing machines from the newspaper’s offices, or Crítica campaigns in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti or striking news vendors. No less than the more explicitly liberal journalistic philosophy behind La Prensa, La Nación, and the Círculo de la Prensa, Crítica’s claims also rested upon the continued viability of a broad consensus around the utopian notions of egalitarian, democratic representation that they invoked. Ironically, it would be Crítica itself that would figure among the chief instigators of the 1930 constitutional rupture that put that consensus to the test.

Indeed, the multiple crises of the 1930s would witness a serious erosion of the political and economic liberalism upon which the entire spectrum of the Buenos Aires commercial press rested. Although the industrialization of the Argentine press had created a newspaper industry whose economic complexity and internal divisions surpassed anything imaginable by the drafters of the 1853 constitution, these contradictions remained largely latent in the 1920s. As competing conceptions of the proper relations between state and civil society gained ground in the following decade, however, the liberal ideological hegemony that undergirded traditional press relations with the national state came under concerted and direct attack from powerful sectors of Argentine society. At the same time, growing class tensions within the journalism profession—a manifestation at once of the press’s industrial transformation as well as of the more general elevation of social conflict in Argentine society—would ultimately prove difficult to contain within the logic of a mutual aid society model that did not differentiate between newspaper proprietors and working journalists. The entire network of relationships that constituted the “fourth estate” underwent a profound transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century; the political and ideological maelstrom of the 1930s would only begin to lay bare the deep fissures in those relationships that this process had engendered.