Fig. 6
News vendors prepare El Mundo for distribution, mid-1930s.
The emergence of the commercial press also profoundly altered the relationship between proprietors and journalists, and between Argentine intellectuals and the market. Where politician-journalist-proprietors of the nineteenth-century press like Bartolomé Mitre had given way to journalism entrepreneurs like Natalio Botana, the newsroom itself also became filled with wage earners. In an environment of growing demand for texts of all kinds, the commodification of journalism practice, as Ángel Rama has observed, allowed intellectuals far greater latitude in their relationship to state power and political factions.97 It did, however, subordinate many of them to the demands of newspaper proprietors and the commercial logical of the newspaper industry. If Martín Fierro author José Hernández, in the era of factional journalism, had viewed the journalist as a “precursor to the political leader,” by the 1920s journalism had become an activity that at best could serve as a source of inspiration, avenue of opportunity, and economic subsidy for writers and artists; at worst, newspapers simply provided a meager paycheck in exchange for long hours and the subordination of writing to the demands of editors and the whims of the market.98
Indeed, the enormous success of many dailies depended in great measure upon the array of truly impressive literary talent that gravitated toward the practice of journalism. Many of Argentina’s most important writers of the 1920s and 1930s came to work for Botana’s Crítica, including Jorge Luís Borges, Roberto Arlt, Raúl and Enrique González Tuñón, Leopoldo Marechal, Edmundo Guibourg, Ulyses Petit de Murat, and Pablo Rojas Paz. Borges’s direction of Crítica’s Revista Multicolor de los Sábados in 1933 and 1934, a brief but memorable period, also made the sensationalist daily a literary rival of La Nación: in addition to the writings of Borges, Petit de Murat, Enrique González Tuñón, and Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, the supplement carried Borges’s translations of international figures like O. Henry, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.99 Similarly, Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío reached his fame while writing for La Nación, the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí served as a correspondent at the paper from 1882 to 1891, and novelist Eduardo Mallea directed La Nación’s literary supplement in the 1930s and 1940s.100 Even the editorial writing that appeared in the paper tended to better that of La Prensa in expressive quality and intellectual subtlety, and La Nación at different times boasted regular editorialists of the caliber (and disparate political views) of Joaquín V. González, Leopoldo Lugones, and Alberto Gerchunoff.101
Despite the glorification of the bohemian lives of journalists in the course of the 1920s—especially those of the literary figures associated with Crítica—the newsroom was a place of long hours and generally poor pay. In his memoirs of his time at Botana’s newspaper, Roberto Tálice, who joined the paper, like many of his colleagues, while in his mid-teens, recounts that not only did his wages cover a small room in a boardinghouse and little more, but “Crítica has made us into fakirs.” Tálice even credited the omnipresence of drug use among the paper’s journalists less to bohemian experimentation than to the more pragmatic demands of their work routine: “Although it pains me to recognize it,” Tálice would later write, “many attribute the miracle of such great resistance to sleep and alcohol to the little envelopes of cocaine, sometimes vials, containing a gram dose of the purest Merk.”102
The experience of Tálice, as well as that of other journalists, embodies a profound shift in the nature of writing as a social practice. The commodification of journalistic labor, though less stark than that of printers’ and newspaper vendors’ labor, rested uneasily with the cultural nature not just of the poetry, short stories, and novels of newspaper employees like Raúl González Tuñón, Jorge Luís Borges, and Roberto Arlt, but with the content of newspapers themselves. In his 1933 Radiografía de la pampa, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada denounced the particular form that the commodification of writing took within the newspaper industry, where authors became subject to the commercial demands of advertisers and found their individual expression brutally subsumed within the collective enterprise of the newsroom. Little remedy existed for the situation, however, since “having nothing to eat is worse… . Those intellectuals free of the politics of the press businesses are destroyed at the root.”103 Novelist Leopoldo Marechal, even more dramatically, evokes the merging of anonymous journalistic labor with the machinery of industrial newspaper production in the “journalists’ hell” of the imaginary city of Cacodelphia. There, in a printing room inspired by the author’s time at Crítica and El Mundo, journalists jump headlong into the rotary presses, only to have the machines crush, print, fold, and “vomit” them as hybrid, commodified newspaper men (hombres-diario).104 Even the paper’s “man on the street” readers could not escape the alienation that formed an integral part of the commercial newspaper industry, with “ten pages full of ignominy” consuming leisure time better dedicated to family and introspection.105
Still, the division of labor in the newsroom and the commodification of journalism practice remained more ambiguous than the broader class divisions in the newspaper industry as a whole. Rather than forming independent trade unions, journalists in the city of Buenos Aires formed the mutual aid society Círculo de la Prensa in 1896, with La Nación founder Bartolomé Mitre himself serving as first president.106 For decades the Círculo remained under the explicit tutelage of newspaper proprietors: Ezequiel Paz of La Prensa and Luís Mitre of La Nación alternated in the presidency of the organization until the 1920s, when they ceded to an alternation of their respective paper’s editors and administrators.107 In addition to providing health, unemployment, and burial benefits to members, the organization served as an effective lobbying organization for the corporate interests of the newspaper industry. Thus, not only did the Círculo de la Prensa act as a watchdog regarding press issues—which, until the 1930s, remained largely confined to denunciations of censorship and harassment outside the Federal Capital—but the group pushed for greater professionalization and training among journalists.108 This latter project bore fruit under the aegis of the Universidad Nacional de la Plata and the Círculo’s sister organization, the Círculo de Periodistas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, with the founding of the country’s first formal journalism school in 1935.109
This dual push toward the independence of commercial newspapers from factional politics and the professionalization of journalism practice, however uneven it remained, corresponded to a substantive shift in the journalistic philosophy of owners of the “serious” press. Ezequiel Paz of La Prensa most forcefully articulated the characteristics of an objective journalism model, which declared accuracy of information, the absence of journalists’ subjectivity, and the clear separation of fact and opinion as the hallmarks of a proper press: “To inform with exactitude and truth; to omit nothing which the public has a right to know; to use always an impersonal and cultured form [of address] without prejudice to the severity and force of critical thought; to abandon rumor … to affirm only that which one has firm conviction from proof or documentation.”110 Similarly, journalists should remain vigilant about the insertion of opinion into reporting; otherwise they would “invade” the territory—physically demarcated in the pages of the paper—of opinion-driven editorials.111 Together with the sharp distance from formal state imperatives guaranteed by the Argentine constitution, the pages of the press would provide the necessary information through which ordinary citizens might judge the acts of government.112
Where adherence to this objectivist model of journalism reinforced the market relationship between press and public by emphasizing the consumption of accurate information as a right of citizenship, Paz maintained an equivocal stance with regard to the editorial pages of La Prensa. “The daily press,” Paz argued in 1920, “must represent public opinion.” Yet Paz continued with an important qualification: “public opinion is the general criterion in exercise of the right to judge, as much of the result as of the appropriateness of the management of issues of common
