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
