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Preface and Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book are bracketed by two events, one in Argentina, the other in Venezuela. While neither is directly related to the history of journalism in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, both bear upon my own approach to the topic in ways that deserve to be made explicit. This is more than an affirmation of the Crocean dictum that “all history is contemporary history”; it is also a confession of just how much the ghosts of the past haunt my understanding of the present.

At about the same time that I boarded a plane in San Francisco to return to Buenos Aires and begin my initial research on the Argentine press, hired gunmen stopped a small car on a highway near the resort town of Pinamar in the province of Buenos Aires and brutally assassinated its driver. For the next two years, monthly marches denouncing that January 1997 murder brought tens of thousands of Argentines into the already chaotic streets of Buenos Aires. Public outrage only increased as forensic teams performed first one and then another autopsy, while indications that the police of the province of Buenos Aires had destroyed crucial evidence at the crime scene drew public suspicion to the very organization in charge of the investigation.

At first, a simple black-and-white photograph of the victim found its way into every public corner of the city; within months, the eyes alone had become ubiquitous. The little-known José Luís Cabezas, handcuffed to the steering column of his car and shot twice before his assassins doused him with gasoline and set fire to his corpse, became a powerful and immediately recognizable symbol of both the disturbingly enduring legacy of state terrorism and the total impunity that powerful criminal interests seemed to enjoy in President Carlos Menem’s Argentina.

Yet this still contentious case has an added element which, unlike the arguably even more serious crimes that jolted the country in those years, assured sustained media attention: Cabezas, a photojournalist, was clearly killed for exercising his profession. For the nation’s media workers, this was more than the murder of a man obviously dearly loved by his family, friends, and coworkers. The assassination of a colleague “in the line of duty” was compounded by a level of symbolic violence against Cabezas clearly intended to silence not just him, but all Argentine journalists.

The killing, however, did just the opposite. Instead, it sparked heated public debates over the rights and obligations of journalists and newsworkers in Argentine society and the appropriate relationship between economic power, political power, and media power in a constitutional democracy. Moving beyond abstract affirmations, these controversies also challenged working journalists and media proprietors on the degree to which journalism and media practices conformed to these ideals.

These same broader media issues became explicitly contentious once again as I was engaged in shaping that initial research into the present text, though within a different public and on a grander scale. In May 2007, Venezuela’s oldest and most watched television station, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), went off the air. Long a forum for virulent criticism of president Hugo Chávez, the station had served as a basic point of reference for the Venezuelan opposition, and its owner, Marcel Granier, had become one of the country’s more visible anti-Chávez public figures. To RCTV supporters, the station’s inability to broadcast is yet more proof that the “Bolivarian Revolution” is little more than an anachronistic dictatorship set on violating the essential constitutional and human rights of opponents. Chávez silenced RCTV for no other reason, they claim, than his recognition of the threat that freedom of expression and public access to accurate information pose to his authoritarian ambitions.

Supporters of the Chávez government paint a different picture. They argue that the station did not go off the air by dictatorial fiat, but by the perfectly proper unwillingness of the country’s constitutional authorities to rubberstamp the renewal of a state-granted broadcast license whose expiration had been determined five decades earlier. For Venezuelan authorities, the crucial support that RCTV gave to conspirators in the April 2002 coup attempt, its repeated incitation to violence during the crisis, and the deliberate misinformation the station broadcast during the upheaval had long placed the station beyond the bounds of both proper journalism and democratic legality. Using the public’s own airwaves, RCTV had betrayed the Venezuelan constitution and the same citizen right to accurate information that the station’s supporters now hypocritically proclaimed as inviolable. Not renewing RCTV’s privileged use of a public good—the nation’s broadcast frequencies—beyond the terms established by a previous government was neither a violation of rights guaranteed to all Venezuelans nor an authoritarian assault on freedom of the press; it was a response to the station’s violation of the public trust and a legally valid, legitimate defense of constitutional rule against those who would see its demise.

If the controversies surrounding the Cabezas assassination were often quite literally the background noise to my initial research, the RCTV case confirms that the kinds of conflicts that I examine in this book are more pervasive than they might at first appear. These disputes reveal just how ambiguous the ideological and juridical foundations of modern journalism truly are, and just how fluid and contested the relationships between public, state, and press remain. They betray the presence of long-running underlying differences of opinion among journalists, newspaper, and media corporation executives, politicians, and the general public over the precise nature of the media’s role in modern society, and what its limits and attendant responsibilities—if any—should be.

In examining the conflict-ridden transformation of the commercial press with the rise of Peronism, I found myself immersed in debates on the nature of journalism and the press that were often strikingly similar to those of the 1990s. As a result, I necessarily engage many of these same larger questions of citizenship, representation, and democracy that swirled around me as I began my research, and I do so for a simple reason: the Menem years marked what many assumed were the death throes of a sweeping and surprisingly durable social and economic project established fifty years earlier. Just as the Argentine neoliberal turn of the 1990s coincided with broader global phenomena, the complex economic and ideological crises that gave rise to and found their “resolution” in the Peronist movement were far from exclusively local. It is my intention, then, that the present study form part of a broader scholarly debate on the transformation of journalism, media institutions, and civil society in the global crises of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Finally, as a historian of Argentina, I make no claims to any privileged understanding of contemporary Venezuela. I do hope, however, that my approach to the press conflicts of mid-twentieth-century Argentina might provide some signposts for navigating the Chávez-era media disputes (and others elsewhere that are sure to surface). If nothing else, this book sounds a cautionary note that such conflicts are likely more profound, more complex, and more ambiguous, but less unusual, than their participants either suspect or are willing to admit.

I could never have written this book without the support of what I found to be a surprising array of people. Readers should be as aware as I am of the degree to which whatever merit this book has rests with them, while all errors and shortcomings in this text are clearly my own.

First, to work with Tulio Halperín Donghi and receive his criticism and encouragement regarding this and other projects has proven absolutely invaluable. I am not sure that he fully realizes—or even cares to imagine—how many students of Latin American history here, in Argentina and elsewhere he has inspired through his insight, wit, common sense, and absolute candor. Still, my enormous debt to him is as much personal as it is professional, and I thank him for everything he has done for me over the years.

Also at UC–Berkeley, Professors Margaret Chowning, Julio Ramos, Linda Lewin, Martin Jay, and Alan Pred helped to shape my approach to the study of history. Margaret Chowning, especially, took interest in this project and continually offered detailed and insightful criticism while at the same time helping me secure the material means to help support my family in the Bay Area. Daniel Hallin of UC–San Diego also provided extremely useful critiques of early versions of several chapters. I am grateful to participants, commentators, and fellow panel members at multiple conferences for their input on papers related to this work, especially Michael Conniff, Joel Horowitz, Tom Klubock, Corinne Pernet, and Bryan McCann.

I owe a great debt to Sandy Thatcher of Penn State Press, who not only gave me excellent advice on the process of publication, but showed near-infinite patience as this text took final shape. I would also like to thank my copyeditor, John Morris, for so admirably taking on the daunting task of making my often tangled prose reader-friendly.

I have had the great fortune to be constantly surrounded by colleagues and friends who have taken an interest in this project and contributed to this text in ways that they might not recognize. Patrick Barr-Melej, Mark Healey, John Jenks, Vera Candiani, Max Friedman, Line Schjolden, Doug Shoemaker, John Brady, Alistair Hattingh, Myrna Santiago, and Paula de Vos, through conferences, dinners, hikes, coffee, and asados helped to shape this work from its earliest stages. Patrick, Max, and Mark in particular always proved more than willing to read multiple chapter drafts as well as answer early morning and late night e-mails on the most trivial matters with great clarity, insight, and patience. In the final stages of preparing the text, I also received invaluable advice from the sharp minds of Eduardo Elena, Oscar Chamosa, Chuck Walton, the anonymous readers at Penn State Press, Nicolás Quiroga, Liliana Da Orden, Jorge Nállim, and—again—Mark Healey. This book is much stronger for their advice; it would surely be stronger still if I had been capable of incorporating all of their suggestions.

It is always a pleasure to return to Buenos Aires, where I have repeatedly abused the hospitality of Bárbara Williams, Andrea Moleres, Pablo Blasberg, and, more recently, Marita Rossi. That Bárbara, Andrea, and Pablo have all emigrated is for me a personally painful reminder of just how much Argentina, and the world, have changed since I began this work. I am also grateful to the Carrasco Villegas family in Santiago de Chile, who provided a warm environment for my revision of large parts of this text.

In Argentina the support of the following groups and individuals proved crucial: the staff of the Archivo General de la Nación, especially Andrés Pak Linares; Norma González and Laura Morana of the Fundación Fulbright; the staffs of the Biblioteca Nacional and the Biblioteca del Congreso; Natalio Botana, Jorge B. Rivera, Oscar Terán, Elías Palti, Diego Armus, and Sylvia Saítta for their early encouragement; Enrique Israel, dedicated scholar, translator, political militant, and caretaker of the library of the Central Committee of the Argentine Communist Party; Luciano Kasio of the Archivo de Prensa (Presidencia de la Nación), not only for his tireless help in digging up dusty folders but for making me welcome in the Casa Rosada; the staff of La Nación, especially Pablo Blasberg; journalists and unionists Jorge Chinetti and Enrique Tortosa of the FAP/APBA and the UTPBA; and Sr. Rufino of the Círculo de la Prensa.

Funding for this work came through grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Chancellor of the University of California, and the UC–Berkeley Department of History. Additionally, support has come from the University of Oklahoma’s Vice President for Research, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of International and Area Studies, and the Department of History. At OU I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Rob Griswold, Sandie Holguín, and Terry Rugeley for their invaluable professional advice, patience, and encouragement.

Finally, my wife, Claudia, has sacrificed more than either of us care to remember in the course of completing this project. She has constantly encouraged and supported me in my research, writing, and teaching of Latin American and Argentine history from our first days in San Francisco and Buenos Aires through the present. Along the way, we have had the good fortune of being accompanied by our beautiful daughter, Fiona Violeta, whose birth coincided with the first written words of this project. This book is as much theirs as mine. Now that it is finished, I can promise both Claudia and Fionita that the late-night typing will end—for a while.