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.
