surrounding the press in this period.
Journalism and Power in the Making of Peronist Argentina
The following chapters uncover the mid-twentieth-century contests to define the social role of the Argentine press both as it should be and as it was in practice, tracing the ways in which these disputes became instrumentalized in the struggle for hegemony within and over the Argentine newspaper industry. Drawing upon and advancing fundamental changes in conceptions of the social aspects of citizenship and the proper relationship between civil society and the state, Peronists adeptly inserted themselves into the institutional and ideological fissures that had begun to emerge within the newspaper industry in the 1930s. Their success in this struggle rested at once on the ability of Peronists to present the “resolution” of particular press-related conflicts as consonant with the creation of a socially just “New Argentina” as well as with the unrealized egalitarian promises of Argentine liberalism. This book is an examination of the competing claims to resolve the tensions between the twentieth-century commercial press and the ideals proclaimed by those nineteenth-century liberals who had established the ideological and juridical foundations of Argentine journalism practice. It is also the story, however, of how the volatile historical processes that had at once given birth to Peronism and undermined the legitimacy of the newspaper industry status quo ultimately militated against the realization of utopian media projects—Peronist and non-Peronist alike—in anything but an authoritarian simulacrum for the duration of the subsequent decade.
In addressing the multiple conflicts within and surrounding the Argentine newspaper industry, Peronists fashioned a discourse of the social role of journalism that posited the state not as a threat to the functioning of the press, but as a defender: of the “true press” from the corrupting influence of commerce; of public opinion from the distorting effects of powerful private interests; of newsworkers from newspaper proprietors; of smaller news organizations from more powerful ones; and of the newspaper industry as a whole from very real external economic shocks and internal production bottlenecks. Perón and his allies, with the balance of state power in their hands, portrayed their actions as falling within the bounds of this discourse, combining their arguments with a capacity for concrete action that outstripped, delegitimized, and divided the opposition. That the confiscation of La Prensa took place through formally legal channels and under conditions of constitutional normality reveals more than the extent to which Peronists had come to dominate Argentine political life. It also reveals the degree to which opponents of Perón failed to articulate convincing alternative visions of the social role of journalism and the press that recognized not just the profound changes inaugurated by Peronism, but the commercial transformation of the press itself in the twentieth century.
Four interrelated processes helped create these circumstances. First, the industrialization of newspaper production produced a press clearly different from that envisioned in classical liberalism, as newspaper institutions became increasingly capital-intensive, profit-oriented organizations. The potentially exclusionary implications of this process for the universal practice of public expression and the distorting power that commercial interests might exert on the means of social communication became important elements in criticism of the press as early as the 1910s. Allegations that the “marketplace of ideas” had degenerated into nothing more than a market in commodities and audiences only increased in the crises of the 1930s and 1940s, setting important precedents and providing useful fodder for subsequent Peronist critiques.40
Yet two other elements of this industrialization also played crucial roles in shaping the Peronist transformation of the commercial press: the increasingly clear and elaborate division of labor in the newspaper industry, and the growing importance of newspapers as economic entities. In the course of the 1930s, disputes within newspaper institutions between newsworkers and proprietors emerged into the open, while the worldwide newsprint crisis in the wake of World War II aggravated both those conflicts as well as the competition between newspapers. By the time of Perón’s ascent, then, the industrialization of the Argentine press had produced a triple fissure: between conceptions of the press as a vehicle of general public expression and the private, capital-intensive and commercial nature of the newspaper industry; between labor and capital within the press; and between those newspaper institutions with access to increasingly scarce and expensive newsprint and those that approached bankruptcy.
Second, the economic crisis of the 1930s, together with the post–World War II restructuring of the world economy, brought a dramatic expansion of the legitimate realm of state activity, fundamentally shifting a view of the proper balance between public and private realms that had achieved broad consensus within the Argentine political class. In the course of the Depression, consensus grew within the Argentine political class for the expansion of state intervention throughout the economy as the primary corrective factor to the domestic impact of a world market in disarray and as a mediator between different sectors of capital.41 The political crises of the 1930s and the multiple threats posed by the world war only boosted state coordination of the economy and lent weight to state intervention in information circulation (through censorship) and production (as wartime propaganda). Increasingly, traditional liberal claims that the state stood as the primary threat to the functioning of the press shared space with pragmatic appeals to the state’s capacity to insulate sectors of the newspaper industry from the devastating effects of postwar economic restructuring. Many began to argue that the state, rather than being a categorical menace, could protect the press’s proper mission from the far greater threats of irresponsible commercialism, monopoly formation, and financial ruin.
Third, the rise of the Argentine urban working class as a significant political force reshaped notions of the proper social role of the press and the ability to exercise the power of journalism in meaningful ways. The new style of politics that this rise inaugurated had at its core broader conceptions of the nature of citizenship and representation and, relatedly, emphasized the importance of the state as a mediator between collective and individual interests. As Daniel James has so convincingly argued, the basis of Perón’s power lay in “his capacity to recast the whole issue of citizenship within a new social context.”42 In relation to the press, this renegotiation of the meanings of citizenship included assertions of the rights of Argentine workers to continuously articulate their aspirations, interests, and daily life through the means of social communication in ways that at once incorporated and transcended liberal notions of individual freedom of expression.43
Rather than negating traditional conceptions of the press as a vehicle for the citizen’s constitutional right of expression and as an embodiment of public opinion, Peronists built upon them. Perón and his followers argued that the problem with the press lay less in the century-old liberal norms of journalism practice than in the refusal of newspaper owners to adhere to those norms in ways that recognized the increasing breadth of the Argentine polity. While proprietors unceasingly invoked the expression of public opinion in their newspapers as the cornerstone to press legitimacy, Peronists added a crucial caveat: the commercial press failed to embody that aspiration in practice, serving instead simply to “publicize the private opinion of newspaper owners.” This failure points directly to a long-standing fissure between public and press that finally revealed itself with the sudden, unexpected political protagonism of a crucial section of that public. In explaining the unanimity of newspaper opposition to Perón in October 1945—just as popular support for the colonel became impossible to ignore—metalworker Ángel Perelman declared that “having neither means nor form of expressing ourselves, we [workers] did not constitute ‘public opinion.’”44 The gap between formal citizenship (full and equal membership in “the public”) and the obviously unequal distribution of wealth and the exercise of power in Argentina would find its promised bridge, supporters of Perón argued, not just in the “social justice” policies of the Peronist state, but in the representation of working class interests in the pages of the daily press—provided that journalists faithfully fulfilled their true mission.
Finally, the growing political polarization of the 1930s became, in the following decade, what Tulio Halperín Donghi has evocatively called a guerra
