it was more than the depth of the cleavages that had opened within Argentine society that facilitated and even encouraged the instrumentalization of the more utopian elements of Peronist discourse in the struggles over the press: Peronists had also quickly come to control all three branches of a vastly more powerful Argentine state. It is within these conditions of unprecedented political dominance that Perón deftly managed to use long-running labor disputes within the newspaper industry, competition among different newspapers, the perception of an Argentine public sphere held captive by private interests, and the growing legitimacy of state economic interventionism to wholly refashion the Argentine media. This transformation culminated in the congressional expropriation of La Prensa in 1951.
Part 1 of this study examines the rise of the modern Argentine press from the period following the battle of Caseros (1852) through the multiple crises of 1930 to 1943. The rapid expansion of the Buenos Aires press transformed its nature: as capitalist relations of production came to dominate the newsroom, conflicts of interest emerged between a new class of professional journalists and the owners of newspapers, undermining notions of “the press” as an internally unified institution. Similarly, the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the newspaper industry began to belie the notion of press freedom as a universal right, while the growing economic weight of the newspaper industry threatened to undermine in important ways the nineteenth-century juridical and ideological foundations upon which the relationship between press, state, and public stood.
Chapter 1 examines the transition from the small partisan press of the nineteenth century to the massive commercial newspaper industry of twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Chapter 2 looks more closely at three particular aspects of the commercial press in the crises of political and economic liberalism in the 1930s: the resurgence of partisan journalism, though now in hybrid form; the increasingly complex state/press relations of that decade; and the unionization drive of Argentine journalists.
The press policies of the military regime (1943–46) that gave birth to the Peronist movement are the topic of part 2. Beyond rapidly expanding state authority in the realm of information production and dissemination, military reformers also fundamentally revised juridical definitions of the nature of the press, recognizing newspapers as commercial institutions and the newsroom as a site of class conflict. In addition, the sudden articulation by military officials of notions of citizenship centered on social rights implied a substantive change in conceptions of the proper relationships between the press, civil society, and the state. The dual fissure that had begun to emerge in the course of the 1930s now suddenly became impossible to ignore: the growing rift between working journalists and newspaper proprietors belied the coherence of the press as a unified collective subject; and the explosion of new social groups onto the political scene seriously undermined claims of newspapers as broadly representative institutions within the public sphere.
Chapter 3 examines initial regime attempts to bring the Argentine press into line with the dictates of military authoritarianism by means of increasingly bureaucratic—and ultimately counterproductive—forms of censorship. Chapter 4 uncovers the process behind the extension of collective bargaining rights to journalists and the multiple conflicts that this move engendered. Chapter 5 analyzes the changing relations between the military regime, the press, and the public in the midst of the stark political polarization of 1945. Ironically, the circumstances surrounding the foundational moment for Peronism also revealed that the emulation of the methods of press cooptation that had served Augustín P. Justo so well for nearly a decade quickly ended in disaster for Perón, in no small measure due to the unexpected depth of the social transformation that the military had only tentatively unleashed. The vivid contradiction between the press’s ideal role as the voice of “public opinion,” expanding conceptions of citizenship, and the Buenos Aires commercial newspapers’ overwhelming rejection of the clearly popular Juan Domingo Perón in his moment of crisis, I argue, forms the basis of the most violent episode of the mass mobilizations that gave formal birth to the Peronist movement on October 17, 1945: the sustained and deadly attack on the offices of the newspaper Crítica.
Part 3 explores the transformation of the Buenos Aires commercial press from the Perón’s February 1946 electoral victory through the consolidation of the Peronist media apparatus in 1951. The failure of Perón’s carefully cultivated ties to powerful newspaper owners like Crítica’s Raúl Damonte Taborda to provide him any support during his fall from grace in mid-1945 signaled to the newly elected president that alliances with figures possessing an autonomous capacity for political mobilization were simply too dangerous. The creation of a “New Argentina” called for a significantly more thorough reworking of the relationships between state, press, and public in ways that might address the growing political and cultural protagonism of Argentine workers; it also meant that the Peronist government would seek to avoid the tactical mistakes of the past and seek to build a media apparatus that might both generate consensus around the regime and make betrayal by newspaper owners impossible. Still, the creation of a properly Peronist communications conglomerate owes much to the particularly dire economic circumstances that most Argentine newspapers faced after the war. These conditions not only aggravated the existing fissures within the newspaper industry, but set the stage for the expropriation of Latin America’s most powerful commercial daily by the Argentine Congress.
Chapter 6 traces the intricate process by which Perón replaced his set of alliances with powerful but unreliable newspaper owners in favor of hidden direct control of the majority of the Buenos Aires commercial press through the private holding company Editorial ALEA and the Undersecretariat of Information and the Press. Chapter 7 examines the complex legal, ideological, economic, and workplace conflicts that culminated in the Argentine Congress’s expropriation of Latin America’s most powerful commercial daily, La Prensa. I argue that the newspaper passed to Peronist hands not simply due to the authoritarian tendencies of Peronism, but also because Peronists managed to articulate relatively coherent solutions to the set of increasingly acute crises that had surrounded and permeated the Argentine newspaper industry since the 1930s. In doing so less by denying liberal claims of the press’s proper role as a vehicle of expression open to all citizens than by asserting that La Prensa self-evidently and repeatedly failed to embody that lofty ideal in practice, they added a layer of ambiguity to opposition invocations of traditional liberal notions of “freedom of the press.” Ironically, in consolidating a media apparatus that acted less as a forum of public expression—working-class or otherwise—than as a stage for the regime’s public acclamation, the expropriation of La Prensa served to generate only an illusory unanimity and a silenced but increasingly desperate opposition.
In this study’s conclusion, I briefly trace the history of the Argentine newspaper industry in the wake of the fall of Perón. It would become clear to a subsequent generation of Peronists that the movement’s leader had proven unwilling and unable to move beyond a clearly authoritarian, sublimating “resolution” of the tensions within the Argentine press. Similarly, the bureaucratization of the newspaper industry had betrayed fundamental promises that the Peronist press might serve as a more open vehicle for citizen rights of collective and individual expression. For a more radical group of influential Peronist intellectuals, I argue, these failures called into question not only the possibility that any compromises with capitalist forms of media ownership might allow for a truly free and representative press, but also nothing less than the emancipatory potential of Peronism itself. Finally, I briefly place the Argentine press conflicts of the period 1930 to 1955 in their transnational context. Despite their uniqueness, these conflicts are not isolated phenomena; they form part of the perpetual, contentious negotiation of the relationship between state and civil society, the power of journalism and commercial media in the age of mass politics, and the nature of citizenship and democracy in capitalist societies.
Part 1
1
THE FOURTH ESTATE
Buenos Aires. Callao and Rivadavia: “Noticias Gráficas!” “Crítica!”
And the whirlwind of the newsboy’s
