has aptly called Argentina’s “peripheral modernity.”18 In the pages of popular dailies like Crítica and Noticias Gráficas, global culture, politics, and sports intersected with local concerns, while the divisions blurred between world and national events, public and private lives. Even the ritual of purchasing a newspaper, performed by few peoples anywhere more often than by Argentines, not only helped mark the rhythms of everyday life in the Argentine capital, it helped mold readers’ collective and individual cultural, political, ethnic, gender, and class identities.19
More explicitly and insistently than most other commodities, newspapers served as an instrument for the creation of meaning and hierarchy regarding broad swaths of social, political, and cultural life. Indeed, the heterogeneity of newspaper content and the ubiquity of newspapers made the press a meaning-creating link between the minutiae of everyday life, the shifting events of city, nation, and world, and the abstract, universalizing expressions of the dominant ideology. This crucial role in the creation of meaning for such large sectors of the population makes the press an essential element of the shifting “structure of feeling” in modern Argentina; or, as James Carey has stated more emphatically, “journalism not only reveals the structure of feeling of previous eras, it is the structure of feeling of past eras, or at least significant portions of it.”20
While Argentina did boast a vibrant partisan press in the first decades of the century, between 1880 and 1920 partisan proprietor-journalists largely gave way to politically and economically independent newspaper entrepreneurs tied not to specific political factions, but to the market. The size and diversity of the Argentine newspaper market facilitated an enormous degree of economic independence for the nation’s press, with the owners of even medium-sized newspapers capable of maintaining themselves beholden primarily to the reading public and private advertisers rather than to state institutions and explicit forms of political power. Directors of the large commercial newspapers still regularly placed their papers’ weight behind specific political figures, parties, and programs. Yet these endorsements were largely tactical alliances to be discarded at will, manifestations of the political convictions of autonomous newspaper proprietors, or commercial strategies directed at gaining the readership of a particular market segment. Thus, while media scholar Silvio Waisbord’s assertion that “the [South American] press never attained independence from the state, and for the most part did not try to become separate” may hold true for much of the continent, the commercial press of Argentina—and, in particular, that of the Argentine capital—marks a clear and important exception.21 Indeed, it is the progressive erosion of this autonomy and the corresponding formation of a more direct relationship between the power of the press and that of the state—an extremely contentious, two-decade process—that forms the basis for the multiple conflicts that I examine here.
The twentieth-century Argentine commercial press thus formed part of an array of institutions whose effectiveness as bulwark of the long-term vitality of the social and political order rested on its relative autonomy from state power proper. This distance from state power proper allowed for the fragmented presence of antisystemic political and cultural discourses within the popular press, giving voice to dissident intellectuals and articulating the interests of broad sectors of the Argentine public in more immediate ways than their formal political representatives. Often while at its most confrontational with regard to state power, the commercial press helped create the kind of pluralistic—even chaotic—public sphere that seemed to confirm rather than undermine the realization of liberalism’s egalitarian promise of universal citizenship.22 As an integral component of the broader Argentine social order, the press served as a crucial forum for the articulation of normative aspects of what remained powerful ideological precepts (for example, “democracy” in the abstract) as well as their practical implications (what “democracy” meant in concrete practice). On a daily basis and usually in the most mundane ways, the commercial press of mid-twentieth-century Argentina thus repeatedly served to generate consent around the dominant ideology as “common sense” and the larger social order as “natural,” while at the same time giving voice to contestation in ways that generally tended to regenerate, rather than weaken, the legitimacy of the social order.23 As a “fourth (e)state” (cuarto estado) beyond the state, Argentine newspapers formed “part of a process by which a world-view compatible with the existing structure of power in society is reproduced, a process which is decentralized, open to contradiction and conflict, but generally very effective.”24
At the same time, the growing reading market that allowed for this relative autonomy from explicit forms of political power also fostered the emergence of newspapers as important economic entities by the 1920s, employing large numbers of journalists, graphic artists, and vendors, consuming productive inputs like newsprint and technologically advanced presses, and mediating between a broad range of producers and Argentine consumers. Just as journalism as a practice of power gains broad social significance through media institutions, media institutions themselves could not exist without newsworkers. To limit any understanding of the twentieth-century press to that of cultural institution, or to reduce newspapers to shapers of ideology and conduits for the exercise of power, is to overlook a fundamental aspect of the social reality of the modern media: the twentieth-century press is as much industry as it is culture. Not only do newspapers help produce social meaning, but people produce newspapers, through processes that involve tools, raw materials, and, from the 1880s onward, an increasingly elaborate division of labor.
Rather than simple instruments of power within the broad array of social contests, the institutions of the twentieth-century Argentine press constituted a commercial newspaper industry. As such, they were riddled not just with the tensions between the cultural/ideological and economic/productive practices of the modern press, but with the more profound struggles inherent in industrial relations of production. If, as Nord argues, the purpose of journalism “is the exercise of power,” this power is not wielded by disembodied journalists through institutions above the social order, but by real people embedded in the real social conflicts of institutions themselves embedded in the broader social order. The tumultuous history of the press in Peronist Argentina is thus one of struggles not only for control of the instruments necessary for the socially meaningful exercise of journalism’s ideological and cultural power, but within a set of institutions permeated by the more far-reaching social conflicts of modern Argentina.
Peronism and Journalism History
To examine at once the Argentine commercial press and Peronism, then, is to engage two “total” phenomena: the first, a set of fluid and internally fragmented cultural, political, and economic institutions that by the 1920s formed an integral part of the rhythms of urban life; the other, a movement inaugurating changes so dramatic as to reshape Argentina for the remainder of the century. As I show here, the Peronist relationship with the Argentine press was not a direct confrontation between two powerful historical agents, nor did it develop in linear fashion. Instead, it proceeded as an accumulation of multiple and often indirect disputes concerning the relative balance of power between newsworkers and newspaper proprietors, between individual newspaper owners, between public and press, and between state and press. It is in the course of a whole range of specific struggles like these, played out across the spectrum of Argentine society, that Peronism emerged and Peronists and non-Peronists alike forged their claims to hold the reins of power in the nation’s political, cultural, and economic institutions. It is also the convergence of these many disputes and their contingent resolutions that constitutes the sweeping transformations of the Peronist era.
The approach to journalism history that I adopt here is a pragmatic response to a surprisingly complex object of study. While historians have long relied upon newspapers as important sources for the study of the past, we have only begun to move beyond our tendency to accept them either as reflections of popular sentiment—while wrestling with the slippery question of audience reception—or as vehicles solely of elite opinion.25 Too many media scholars, in turn, accept a historically static view of the press, anthropomorphizing “the press” as a coherent collective agent while reifying the ideological underpinnings of the newspaper industry—even
