fiercely contested terrain of press-related conflicts. As a result, contemporary (often North American) norms frequently serve as a de facto transhistorical yardstick in media studies, bringing researchers to see ideologically charged notions like “freedom of the press” not as the contingent products of social contests, but as concrete and stable, existing or lacking in any given time and place, at once beyond history and capable of being born, dying, and even rising from the dead.26
The wide-ranging nature of the debates as well as the depth and complexity of the conflicts examined in this book caution against these approaches. In fact, these struggles bring to the fore the historically changing character of our own understanding of what, in fact, “the press” is. In his history of violence against the press in the United States, media scholar John Nerone offers a far more useful conception of what we study when we study the press. Nerone describes the press not as a static entity, but as a multifaceted “network of relationships,” and sees violence directed against press institutions as part of episodic struggles over precisely what this network entails.27 We can go further: disputes over the press are limited neither to moments of violent confrontation nor to periods of heated public debate. Instead, these mark points of inflection in the unceasing process of reproducing this network of relationships and readjusting the relative power held by the myriad parties involved.
Rather than fundamentally stable, then, the descriptive understanding and normative nature of the press—that is, what the press is and what the press should be, respectively—are contingent elements of a whole range of disputes in a network of relationships no more static than any other set of relationships in capitalist societies. Changes in the status of newspapers as commodities, the relative importance of commercial display and classified advertising, the complexity of newsroom relations of production, press jurisprudence, and the nature of the reading public all send ripples throughout the press’s entire network of relationships. These relationships, in turn, are not above the social order. Instead, they form an integral part of more fundamental social norms and practices, embedding each newspaper institution in processes of historical change not as simple agent or object, but as an array of sites of contention.
The intricacy of the network of relationships that comprised the press and its interpenetration with the broader structures of power in Argentine society meant, quite simply, that the newspaper industry formed an integral part of the social and political order whose crises in the 1930s gave way to the unexpectedly profound transformations of the Peronist years. In its institutional character, the mid-twentieth-century commercial press was ambiguous and internally contradictory: at once political-cultural forum and commercial enterprise; indispensable medium of public opinion and source of private profit; channel of dissent and bolster of the social order. Similarly, with its thousands of newsworkers, high-tech capital goods, and extensive material inputs, the newspaper industry was an important element not just of the political and cultural spheres of Argentine society, but of the economic realm as well. Given its hybrid nature, the rapidly shifting distribution of power and accompanying political conflicts in Argentine society had inescapable consequences for the commercial press, and made it both weapon and prize.
Well before the emergence of Perón as a significant national figure, disputes surrounding the status of journalists’ rights in the workplace and the social meaning of journalism practice had begun to expose the growing discrepancy between the ideological and juridical foundations of the press in nineteenth-century liberalism and the commercial practices of the twentieth-century newspaper industry. As a result, Perón-era conflicts for control of the press as an instrument of social power remained intimately linked to long-running struggles over the balance of class power within the newspaper industry. The attention I pay to working journalists in this study, then, stems less from a desire to restore newsworkers to the historiography of the press than from a recognition of the pivotal role that newsworkers played in the broader debates over the meaning of journalism, the clear impact of union militancy on the juridical standing of press institutions, and the importance of class cleavages within the newspaper industry for the reshaping of state-press relations in the 1930s and 1940s.28 Similarly, I explore the links between changing relations of production in the newsroom, emerging notions of social citizenship, and the practical consequences of the profound economic and ideological crises that racked the country. In examining the transformation of the Argentine commercial press, I also point beyond the state-press conflicts of Peronist Argentina to the inherent volatility of relationships between state, market, public, and crucial institutions of civil society in the age of mass politics.
In engaging the press, Perón and the Peronists thus faced a powerful set of institutions permeated by the same set of profound crises that would give rise to Peronism. The increasingly strained relations between journalists and proprietors within an economically complex and capital-intensive newspaper industry, the consequences of the commercial press’s legal and ideological dependence upon a faltering constitutional liberalism, and the growing legitimacy of state interventionism all shaped press development in the 1930s. Conflicts surrounding these processes did more than provide convenient excuses for authoritarian intromission in the Argentine press in the following decade. Though they certainly did that as well, more significantly, it was in no small measure the aggravation of these same crises in even more rapidly changing circumstances that determined at once the opportunities and limits—the realm of the possible—not just for Perón in his approach to the press, but for the shifting distribution of power between newsworkers, newspaper proprietors, the state, and the reading public in the Peronist years.
For this reason, the emphasis that I place on the evolution of state-press relations in both the 1930s and under the military regime of 1943 to 1946 responds to more than a desire to avoid condemning these years to the status of “prelude” to the Peronist heyday. Like other scholars, I consider the profound changes of the 1930s key to understanding not just the conditions that made Peronism possible, but also the social and political forces whose conflicts called the movement into existence.29 The surprisingly sophisticated forms of media management developed by the Augustín P. Justo regime in the 1930s have remained virtually unexplored by scholars, despite their importance as crucial points of inflection in both the development of the Argentine press and the course of Argentine political history.30 From 1943 to 1945, Perón and his military allies drew from these precedents when formulating their own media strategies; the nearly disastrous consequences of those strategies had important implications for the press following Perón’s election to the presidency in 1946. Perón’s heavy-handed press policies of the years 1947 to 1955, I argue, did not follow strictly from the demands of a scripted, preconceived totalitarian media project, nor were they merely a local adaptation of foreign media models. Instead, they responded as much to Perón’s spectacular initial failures in engaging the press as to his unexpectedly resounding success in mobilizing public support in the crisis of October 1945—support that came, significantly, despite the unanimous opposition of “public opinion” as expressed in the pages of the nation’s major newspapers.
Rather than unidirectional phenomena in which the press repeatedly stood as a simple target of Peronist action, the conflicts surrounding the newspaper industry that I examine here left not just the press transformed, but Peronism as well. Indeed, the public and private disputes for influence over—or outright control of—the Argentine press formed an integral part of the process through which Peronists forged the legitimacy of their project while simultaneously undermining that of their opponents. Long-running struggles over the institutional, political, and economic aspects of journalism practice played a crucial role in helping shape Peronism’s passage from its roots in a military regime seeking civilian support in 1944 to a loose and contradictory reformist movement born of an abrupt democratic opening and unprecedented working-class mobilization in 1945 to 1947. These same disputes—and the seismic shift in the media landscape that they produced—also helped determine the Peronist government’s consolidation by the early 1950s as an increasingly bureaucratic regime invoking formulaic and ritualized public acclamation.31
Thus, to view the “Peronization” of the Argentine press as an essentially linear process or as the preordained result
