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
