It was precisely the contentious nature of this continued practice of factional journalism that brought Socialist Party founder Juan B. Justo to leave the paper’s staff in 1896, later denouncing La Nación for “reserving its energy to defend the vileness of the Mitrista camarilla.”52 Not until Emilio Mitre’s death in 1909, in fact, did the directors of La Nación establish the paper’s autonomy from partisan and factional politics in a less ambiguous fashion. The moment proved ripe for such a move, as the series of electoral reforms that culminated with the expansion of effective suffrage under Roque Sáenz Peña in 1912 not only provided an alternative to insurrection for dissident sectors of the Argentine political class, but also signaled a broadening of that class itself.53 In the new political environment, Jorge and Luís Mitre, the paper’s new coproprietors, quickly distanced La Nación from narrow partisan affiliation in order to extend the paper’s reach to this increasingly heterogeneous Argentine political class as a whole.
This transformation of La Nación from an organ of Mitrismo proved as successful as it was ambitious: resting on an expanding market of readers and advertisers, the Mitres positioned the family paper to act as a “tribunal of doctrine,” ostensibly impartial to the immediacies of partisan politics while maintaining a “political-pedagogical” mission directed at the entirety of the Argentine elite.54 Under Jorge and Luís Mitre, then, editorialists at the paper publicly proclaimed their role as a sort of collective organic intellectual of the nation’s ruling class, pragmatically reworking the abstractions of liberal ideological principles in changing practical circumstances in order to guide the Argentine economic and political elite.55 Rather than self-consciously occupying the “combat posts” of factional politics or viewing journalistic activity as a stepping-stone to concrete political action, the journalists at La Nación instead claimed that they could effectively, in the words of Ricardo Sidicaro, “view politics from above.” This rearticulation of the web of relationships between journalism practice, market, and state would situate the Mitre family paper as an effective ideological-institutional guardian of the long-term viability of an Argentine social order that had emerged from the export boom of 1880–1910.
Unlike La Prensa, with which it shared the same journalistic model and liberal-conservative orientation, and despite its greater ideological flexibility, La Nación did not attract an audience far beyond the upper-class and professionals addressed in its pages. It never reached the circulation levels of La Prensa, selling approximately 210,000 copies daily (317,500 on Sundays) by 1935 and, despite slowly increasing sales during World War II, finishing 1945 with an average circulation about 150,000 copies short of the Paz family’s newspaper.56 Yet the inability of the Mitre family’s paper to match the growth of La Prensa—whose monopoly on classified advertising guaranteed an ever-increasing, multiclass readership—did not signal a commercial failure for La Nación: the paper still finished the war with the sixth-highest circulation in Latin America, outselling its nearest non-Argentine peer by 10,000 copies daily.57 The contrast with La Prensa was also reflected in the comparative architectural modesty of the paper’s offices. While still close to the geographic center of national political power, the relatively staid offices of La Nación were several blocks away on San Martín Street, the heart of the country’s financial district, only moving to the commercial Florida Street in 1929.58
If the phenomenal growth of La Prensa brought with it a particularly intimate relationship with the United Press, La Nación similarly became closely allied with a United States–based news organization. Jorge Mitre had originally signed a contract with the United Press in 1916 order to bypass the French news agency Havas, which held the rights to the South American market under the terms of the international wire service cartel. Mitre, however, attempted to expand his own news service in Latin America at the same time, and eventually broke his contract with the United Press in 1918 in a dispute over the ownership of collected information. The conflict between La Nación and the United Press worked to the detriment of the former, especially as La Prensa began to throw its economic weight behind the rapidly expanding agency. Mitre’s abandonment of the United Press in favor of the more established and powerful Associated Press thus linked La Nación with a news service less dependent upon the paper’s continued satisfaction, especially in comparison to the services rendered to La Prensa by United Press. Still, La Nación became the Associated Press’s gateway into the South American news market, and the offices of the Mitre family’s paper also served as the regional offices of the Associated Press. The relationship between La Nación and the Associated Press only grew more intimate in the wake of the formal dissolution of the wire service cartel in 1934—a process that the Argentine papers did much to facilitate.59
Where La Prensa and La Nación represented the journalistic high-water mark of Argentina’s “serious” press in the first half of the twentieth century, the proprietor and journalists of the newspaper Crítica fervently embraced the whole range of possibilities that the medium of commercial journalism presented. Founded by the Uruguayan émigré Natalio Botana in September 1913, the evening paper dramatically changed the practice of journalism in the country, and its abrasive, sensationalistic character is as intimately linked to its historical moment of origin as the more staid, reasoned styles of the Paz and Mitre family newspapers are linked to their moments of origin. Within a decade of the paper’s founding, Botana himself also became the most spectacular and controversial example of a new social type: the journalistic entrepreneur, whose conspicuous wealth and enormous social influence flowed not from landed interests or political patronage, but from the practice of journalism itself.60 Indeed, although La Prensa’s economic power and international stature were unrivaled among the Argentine press of the first half of the century, Crítica’s unique character, and the vast web of anecdote and legend surrounding Botana, still loom largest in the Argentine popular imagination.61 In quite unexpected ways, it was Botana’s great success in creating an aura around Crítica as the voice of the urban popular classes and embodiment of utopian aspirations for egalitarian democracy that placed the paper at the center of the many of the press conflicts after 1930.
The same national political opening that prompted Jorge and Luís Mitre to abandon the vestiges of La Nación’s entanglement with factional politics created much of the impetus for the founding of Crítica. Botana, a working journalist, launched the paper in the wake of the 1912 Sáenz Peña Law’s expansion of suffrage, a moment when national political life suddenly became significantly more relevant to a much larger section of the population.62 Crítica, Botana announced in the paper’s first issue, would “repudiate the old practice of the fourth power”—that is, the “petulant” use of journalism to advance the interests of a specific political faction—and instead would remain “without program, but with ideas.”63 If the Mitre brothers sought to create in La Nación a forum of debate and guidance for the nation’s political class as a whole, Botana similarly intended to create an organ that would shape broad political worldviews. Unlike La Nación, with its self-conscious appeals to the nation’s political class, however, Crítica would engage the now effectively enfranchised and rapidly growing urban middle and working classes. Through Crítica, Botana sought to make the Argentine press—or at least his newspaper—a factor in the new age of mass politics. The direction he took implied a dramatically new journalistic style and set of journalism practices.
Yet the director’s intention of using the paper as the vehicle for organizing the urban popular classes into a base for a disparate array of conservative political forces left Crítica at a serious competitive disadvantage with respect to its already well-established conservative evening rival La Razón. The difficulty of success for Botana’s project only seemed confirmed as the Sáenz Peña Law resulted not in the unlikely scenario of mass affirmation of liberal-conservatism, but in the rather predictable ascent of the tremendously popular Radical Party leader Hipólito Yrigoyen to the presidency in 1916. As Sylvia Saítta