rough vocabulary of the working-class neighborhood [arrabal], which pretends to be democratic, but is nothing more than the result of intransigence and ignorance.”113 Two decades later, Ángel Bohigas, vice-director of La Nación, similarly argued against the validity of the press’s direct appeals to a popular readership, since “the journalist should try to make his page get to the thinking classes of the country, to those who carry greater weight in the elucidation of affairs of public interest.”114 Through the “healthy civic propaganda” of La Prensa’s editorial pages and La Nación’s “elevated mental level,” the owners and directors of the “serious press” explicitly sought to shape public opinion, an aim that stood in tension with similarly explicit assertions of the press as a virtually unmediated expression of the broader opinion, elevated or not, of the general public.115 Similarly, Ezequiel Paz’s claims that the press represented public opinion as a whole rested uneasily with Paz’s simultaneous dismissal of the subjective views of working-class readers.
The proprietors and editors of La Prensa and La Nación—and, by extension, the leadership of the Círculo de la Prensa—embraced a vision of the press and the social role of journalism firmly rooted in nineteenth-century liberalism, but with important modifications. In this libertarian conception of the press, the negative aspects of press freedom as enshrined in the Argentine constitution—in which the press would remain free from state interference—received special emphasis; like their counterparts in the United States and Britain, proponents of the “serious press” repeatedly elevated the press as “a ‘Fourth Estate’ in the government process.”116 Yet, in its positive aspects, the conception of press freedom articulated by the proprietors of La Prensa and La Nación had undergone a crucial transformation. In both cases, the constitutional principle of the right of publication as a component of citizenship remained rhetorically powerful even as the scale of the commercial press—and the scale of the polity—eroded the practical possibilities of a universally participatory daily press. The rights of citizenship through the press instead increasingly centered upon the public’s information consumption, with the ideal of the “informed citizen” largely eclipsing notions of the universality of rights of expression. As a consequence, the accuracy and impartiality of information together with claims to represent public opinion faithfully—however ambiguous they remained alongside Ezequiel Paz’s exclusionary, class-based qualifications—became pivotal elements of legitimacy for the “serious press.”
Of the major Argentine dailies in existence prior to 1930, Crítica diverged most markedly from this journalistic model. The name of the paper and the slogan below its masthead—“God set me upon your city like a horsefly on a noble horse, to bite it and keep it awake. (Socrates)”—announced a sharp watchdog role for Botana’s newspaper, and the constant campaigns against certain public figures served in good measure to reinforce that perception. Yet the cult around the paper and its bohemian “gang of boys” (muchachada) exalted the notion of the journalist and newspaper that found little common ground with the ideals set forth by Ezequiel Paz. On the contrary, not only did Crítica journalists self-consciously portray themselves as committed and active participants in the news they were reporting, but, as often as possible, Crítica and its journalists were the news itself.117 Botana and his staff similarly sought to create a relationship, even a complicity, between reader and paper based not on rationality and appeals to elite culture, but on an emotional identification of Crítica and its journalists with the culture, poverty, and language of the urban popular classes. More than a newspaper, Crítica was “the hand for the fallen, the support for the widow and the orphan, the paternal hand for children, and the defender of the innocent.”118
If Ezequiel Paz could claim La Prensa as a faithful representative of public opinion only by dismissing as irrelevant the language and interests of a significant portion of that public, Botana sought discursively to dissolve the boundaries between Crítica and the very public Paz discarded. In reassuring readers that commercial success would not change their “friendship,” the journalists at Crítica went beyond asserting that they “thought with the mind of the people” to cultivate an affective identification between the paper and the urban popular classes.119 Upon the move to Avenida de Mayo 1333, the paper’s journalists blurred any substantive distinction between the popular reading public and what had become a significant commercial enterprise: “If at some time you need the loyal advice or help of a friend, come to CRITICA as if to a common home, assured that the doors of our house will only be closed to domination, abuse or injustice. Reader and newspaper, we form, in sum, a single thing: an immense journalistic entity that lives of the people and for the people and in which thousands and thousands of men collaborate. Consider yourself a kind of ‘shareholder’ in this singular Sociedad Anónima Popular that is CRITICA.”120 Where the proprietors and directors of La Prensa and La Nación viewed their papers largely as shapers of elite opinion and dispensers of the information needed for the proper practice of individual citizenship, Botana upped the ante: Crítica’s legitimacy rested upon assertions that it was nothing less than the voice, the democratic embodiment—as chaotic as that might prove—of the urban popular classes in the public sphere.
The Coming Crisis
This notion of Crítica as an expression of the collective citizenship of the urban popular classes represented a particular—and particularly lucrative—solution to a fundamental dissonance that the industrialization of the press and the concomitant expansion of political participation had created: by the 1920s what the press was had shifted dramatically; notions of what the press should be had changed little. On the one hand, the set of relationships between journalists, newspapers, and public had become increasingly mediated by commercial exchange rather than participation and representation, while the very scale and capital-intensive nature of the Buenos Aires newspaper industry exceeded what nineteenth-century Argentine liberals might have conceived. On the other, the underlying ideological and juridical bases of journalism practice had remained centered upon a conception of the press as the privileged forum for the public expression of opinion. How could Argentines exercise their rights of expression through the press in a socially meaningful way if the means to do so remained beyond their reach? Could the affective bonds between Crítica and its audience and the supposedly rational link between the so-called serious press and its public effectively create a truly representative public sphere? Did the rights of citizenship in relation to the press rest solely upon the right to consume accurate information? In short, who embodied the rights of the press: journalists, proprietors, or members of the public?
Yet self-proclamations of Botana’s paper as the collective voice of Argentine workers rested on more than the pervasive use of the underworld lunfardo dialect in the pages of the paper, the distribution of sewing machines from the newspaper’s offices, or Crítica campaigns in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti or striking news vendors. No less than the more explicitly liberal journalistic philosophy behind La Prensa, La Nación, and the Círculo de la Prensa, Crítica’s claims also rested upon the continued viability of a broad consensus around the utopian notions of egalitarian, democratic representation that they invoked. Ironically, it would be Crítica itself that would figure among the chief instigators of the 1930 constitutional rupture that put that consensus to the test.
Indeed, the multiple crises of the 1930s would witness a serious erosion of the political and economic liberalism upon which the entire spectrum of the Buenos Aires commercial press rested. Although the industrialization of the Argentine press had created a newspaper industry whose economic complexity and internal divisions surpassed anything imaginable by the drafters of the 1853 constitution, these contradictions remained largely latent in the 1920s. As competing conceptions of the proper relations between state and civil society gained ground in the following decade, however, the liberal ideological hegemony that undergirded traditional press relations with the national state came under concerted and direct attack from powerful sectors of Argentine society. At the same time, growing class tensions within the journalism profession—a manifestation
