At the same time, the institutional structure of the press increasingly reflected the general contours of the Argentine economy. Not only did newspaper production necessitate progressively greater investments in imported capital goods and inputs like technologically advanced rotary presses, newsprint, and ink, but the transformation of the press demanded a reworking of newspaper relations of production. In the Buenos Aires of the mid-1920s, the politician-proprietors of nineteenth-century journalism, who had founded newspapers as “combat posts” in the defense of private economic and political interests, had largely given way to journalistic entrepreneurs whose primary business interests sprang from the newspapers themselves. As the ranks of politician-proprietors ceded to newspaper capital proper, the press’s rapid economic development and increasing technological complexity, as well as the growing thematic diversity of newspaper content, demanded a corresponding expansion of the ranks of wage earners specialized in different aspects of newspaper composition, production, and distribution. By 1930, Argentina’s commercially insignificant partisan press of the nineteenth century had become an economically powerful, capital-intensive, newspaper industry employing thousands of wage-earning journalists, printers, managers, and distributors.
This emergence of a new kind of press carried with it a rising dissonance between idealized conceptions of the social role of journalism and the commercial practices of the modern Argentine newspaper industry. The press’s juridical bases centered upon an understanding of newspapers as vehicles of citizen participation in an idealized public sphere, with the press as a whole acting as a fourth estate alongside and balancing the other representative institutions of republican governance. This conception, firmly rooted in nineteenth-century liberalism, held the economics of newspaper operations as incidental. Indeed, newspapers had rarely proven profit-making ventures in the course of the nineteenth century, and economic self-sufficiency was usually as surprising as it was short-lived.5 Yet, by the 1920s, not only had newspaper proprietors begun to wring spectacular wealth from an activity that for ideological reasons lay beyond the margins of the Argentine commercial code, but the commercial transformation of the newspaper industry had left the relationship between the ideological bases of journalism practice, press-related jurisprudence, and the actual functioning of the newspaper industry increasingly strained. The multiple fissures that had begun to open in the Argentine newspaper industry in the course of this transformation were precisely what would fuel the press conflicts of the 1930s and, ultimately, of the Peronist years.
The Legal Environment of the Argentine Press
The ideological roots and legal precedents of Argentine journalism are tangled with ambiguities more pronounced and more complex than the dominant, romanticized view of national press history allows.6 Rather than marking an abrupt and total rupture with an emphatically statist colonial political philosophy, the initial moves to create what would become the Argentine national press retained crucial aspects of the previous views of the realm of state prerogative, and thus of the relationship between the state and the means by which information is created and distributed. Both the Argentine press and early press law necessarily emerged in a moment in which, as Jorge Myers has argued, “the principal ideological traditions that have shaped the political vocabularies of the twentieth century … had still not achieved a full crystallization.”7 Indeed, in the chaotic first years of the republic, ideological clarity often served only to limit the range of options open to those attempting to establish a new political order in the wake of the dissolution of the old. Even if the Constitution of 1853 created a more stable juridical basis for journalism practice, the charter also incorporated new elements of uncertainty. Not surprisingly, each of the multiple parties to twentieth-century press conflicts could find ample raw material and historical precedents for their arguments by invoking the nineteenth-century ideological, institutional, and juridical beginnings of the national press.
Based as much in the immediate political exigencies of national state formation as in the realm of private political expression, the Argentine press’s moment of birth embodies these profound ambiguities. While informational hand-copied gazetas circulated in Buenos Aires even before the city became the seat of a new viceroyalty in 1776, commercial print journalism began with the appearance in 1801 of El Telégrafo Mercantil, Rural, Político, Económico e Historiográfico del Río de la Plata.8 The first regular periodical of the republic, however, had its origins as an integral part of the nascent national state: at the behest of the ruling junta, the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres published its first issue under the direction of Mariano Moreno on June 7, 1811. Though the junta explicitly created the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres not as a vehicle of private expression but as the mouthpiece of a still fragile provisional government in the midst of the violently contentious process of breaking the colonial link and fashioning a new state, Argentine journalists have long held the paper’s appearance as the birth of the national press and Moreno as the nation’s first journalist.9 Invocations of Moreno as the archetype of the Argentine journalist thus carry with them a legacy with an equivocal relationship to the antistatist conceptions of journalism practice that would become hegemonic later in the century.
The junta decree that laid the juridical basis for national press law similarly maintained a degree of ambivalence between the realm of private prerogative and the public tasks of state formation. Still, well into the twentieth century newspaper editors would point to the first two articles of the junta decree of April 22, 1811, as establishing the press as outside the realm of legitimate state regulation:
Article 1. All bodies [organizations] and private persons of whatever condition and state they might be, have the freedom to write, print, and publish their political ideas, without need for any license, revision, or approval prior to publication, under the restrictions and responsibilities expressed in the present decree.
Article 2. All present press courts, as well as the censorship of political works prior to their publication, are hereby abolished.10
The decree declared the individual action of publishing at once a “barrier against arbitrary actions by those who govern,” a source of public education, and “the only path to arrive at knowledge of true public opinion.” In this way, the junta decree established a latitude of publishing freedom that broke the restrictions enforced by the Bourbon colonial regime and promoted a significant democratization of public debate regarding the formation of what would become the postcolonial state.
However, the same decree restricted in important ways this freedom of private citizens to publish. If the decree did not require authors to sign their articles, it did insist that publishers record the authors’ identity so they could be held accountable in case of denunciations for acts of libel and licentiousness, writings that contradicted “public decency and good customs,” and any other “abuse of freedom of the press.” Similarly, article 6 asserted the necessity of prior censorship by ecclesiastical authorities with regard to writings on religious topics, while other articles of the decree loosely prohibited the “abuse of freedom of the press” and the publication of writing that was libelous, licentious, or contrary to public decency. To enforce these elements, a “Supreme Junta of Censorship” with ecclesiastical participation, established by article 13 of the decree, stood ready to “assure freedom of the press and contain at the same time its abuse.”11 Deán Gregorio Funes, author of the decree, justified these measures before the junta, explaining that “the liberty [libertad] to which the press has a right is not in favor of licentiousness [libertinaje] of thought.”12
Initial formulations of the juridical norms surrounding the Argentine press, then, embodied a blend of interpretations on the parameters of the press and the realm