The 1880 federalization of the city of Buenos Aires, by separating the nation’s most prosperous and populous city from the country’s most powerful province, effectively resolved many of the more contentious issues facing the federal nature and geographical balance of powers of the Argentine national state. With the relative subsiding of large-scale social conflict that the measure secured, the most pressing impediment to the rapid expansion of the Argentine economy receded. The subsequent economic boom, and the generation of unprecedented prosperity for many in the port city, provided an environment in which commercial newspapers could serve at once as catalysts and beneficiaries of an increasingly vibrant national economy.
At the same time, the creation of the Federal Capital also established a juridically and economically privileged territory for the emergence of the commercial press. The emergence and spectacular expansion of the Buenos Aires newspaper industry thus owes as much to a growing acceptance of the antistatist elements of Argentina’s liberal Constitution of 1853 as to the federalization of the national capital. This combination, coupled with the subsequent rise in the public influence of newspaper owners that it helped engender, allowed the negative interpretation of press freedom—as freedom from state regulation—to emerge as dominant, while the positive right of publication became increasingly displaced from private individuals to become a broader, quasi-corporatist, institutional right of “the press.” In the process, Buenos Aires newspapers themselves became integral elements of the liberal institutional and ideological hegemony that played such a crucial role in their emergence.29 Indeed, it is the rupture of that hegemony in 1930, with the military coup of September serving as both catalyst and symptom, that would ultimately undermine the broad consensus that had developed regarding the ideal character of the Argentine press.
The Structural Transformation of the Argentine Press
The rapid expansion of the press in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in fact, came coupled with a marked change in the practical character of journalism practice and the nature of newspaper institutions. If the explicitly political and bitterly polemical writing of the anti-Rosista exiles served as the foundation for Argentine journalism in the wake of Caseros, it is this latter tradition of periodismo faccioso (factional journalism) that would eventually give birth to the nation’s modern commercial press.30 Yet the dramatic economic and demographic changes of the Argentine fin de siècle entailed a quantitative and qualitative transformation of the Buenos Aires press that differentiated the twentieth-century commercial newspapers far more starkly from their predecessors. By the 1920s, a nineteenth-century press focused on partisan militancy had become Latin America’s largest commercial newspaper industry.
Indeed, the Argentine press in the years between the fall of Rosas in 1852 and the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 formed an integral part of the often violent confrontations over the final character of the Argentine state.31 More than a simple extension of political activity, the practice of journalism was intrinsically political, with the separation between time dedicated to writing and time dedicated to state activities determined less by individual interest than by fluctuations in a given faction’s access to state power. Thus, journalist-politicians like José Hernández viewed newspapers like El Nacional Argentino together with the ballot box as a single “battlefield,” and competition for readership as an appeal to the mobilizing potential of ideas. For Hernández, journalists simultaneously gave voice to and guided public opinion, while the journalist himself served as a kind of precursor to a more sophisticated political leader that had yet to appear unequivocally.32 Similarly, Bartolomé Mitre found in La Nación Argentina a “combat post” to defend his factional interests, and in journalism practice more generally a place for tactical retreat from more literal battlefields.33
It is precisely out of this tradition of factional journalism that two of the twentieth century’s more important Argentine commercial newspapers emerged. Both La Prensa and La Nación had their origins in the final conflicts over the status of Buenos Aires and the nature of Argentine federalism. Yet both newspapers would survive and prosper well after those conflicts had subsided, in large measure due to their owners’ embrace of key elements of the less factious journalism of opinion and objective journalism models—models that, in many ways, presented themselves as historical possibilities only with the subsiding of those conflicts and the establishment of liberal hegemony.34 This transition, together with the concomitant emergence of a market more than capable of economically sustaining a set of commercially oriented newspapers divorced from specific political factions, ushered in a period of journalism in Buenos Aires in which polemical stances became increasingly subordinate to newspaper business interests.35
The commercial transformation of the Argentine press has received scant attention from historians precisely with regard to the newspaper that would become Latin America’s most economically powerful in the first half of the twentieth century: La Prensa. The appearance of La Prensa, founded by José C. Paz, on October 18, 1869, marked an important step in the creation of a new style of Argentine journalism. In the first issue, Paz immediately declared his intention to move beyond the practices of factional journalism to create a paper that would always maintain an “independence” from political factions, resting instead on a broader reading market. Rather than signaling a “mercantile motive,” Paz declared, La Prensa’s engagement with the market would remain restricted to that needed to allow the editors to “be genuine interpreters of public opinion.”36 Indeed, even the layout of Paz’s paper, with its physical separation of opinion, information, and advertising, revealed a move to more general notions of the press as a vehicle of both commerce and expression.37
Any embrace of the more modern journalism of opinion and “objective” journalism models continued to rest uneasily with the still prominent role that force played in the resolution of political disputes. This became clear with Paz’s participation in a rebellion against the presidential succession of Nicolás Avellaneda in 1874. Upon joining the rebellion, Paz decried the relative powerlessness of the press itself against the “political caudillos” dominating the country and suppressing “public opinion.” In this situation, Paz wrote, “the word of the press is impotent… . What should be done in this case? Honorable and patriotic journalism knows no other temperament than to trade the pen for the sword.”38 Thus, despite the subsequent consolidation of La Prensa as the country’s premier commercial daily and preeminent example of the potential of new kinds of journalistic practices and institutions, this transition was neither immediate nor entirely unequivocal. As would become apparent in the course of the 1930s, the tradition of factional journalism never entirely vanished in Argentina, even if it did remain largely submerged beneath the commercial strategies of the major dailies.
Claims to economic independence for the paper, however, were more than mere assertions. Indeed, the Paz family newspaper established a market position that gave it an unprecedented autonomy vis-à-vis not just Argentine political society, but even the rural landed interests with which the paper’s editors continued to identify. If the Paz family maintained