Among the major Argentine newspapers only Noticias Gráficas emerged directly from within the multiple crises unleashed in the 1930s. The paper (in its first month called simply Noticias) appeared on June 10, 1931, as an attempt by La Nación’s Jorge Mitre to occupy the gap in the evening market left by the suspension of Crítica after the military coup of September 6, 1930. At first a tabloid largely in the style of El Mundo, the paper benefited from conflicts within the administration and newsroom of the “new” evening paper Jornada, a thinly disguised Crítica surrogate. Alberto Cordone, director of Jornada/Crítica during Natalio Botana’s exile in Uruguay, joined the staff of Noticias Gráficas in September of 1931, bringing with him thirty colleagues.79 Noticias Gráficas quickly adopted the format of Crítica virtually in its entirety. The resurrection of Crítica proper in February 1932, however, placed serious strains on Noticias Gráficas, as increased competition in the newspaper marketplace together with strong attacks from the pages of Crítica eroded Noticias Gráficas’s readership. Despite renouncing his post at La Nación in favor of his brother Luís, Jorge Mitre failed to create a newspaper financially independent of La Nación. Through much of the decade Jorge Mitre continued to pass Noticias Gráficas’s bills for electricity, rent, newsprint, and other expenses to La Nación—much to the dismay of the morning paper’s shareholders.80 Businessman José Agusti finally rescued the paper from complete financial collapse in 1938 and remained as the proprietor and director of Noticias Gráficas until the daily came under Perón’s control in 1947. If Noticias Gráficas remained financially precarious for the entirety of its existence, its circulation nonetheless rivaled that of Crítica: in 1935 the paper’s three daily editions averaged 250,000 copies, and 270,000 copies in 1945.81
The federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 inaugurated a transformation of the city’s press unrivaled within Latin America, a process that only accelerated with the expansion of suffrage via the electoral reforms of 1912. Argentines were already among the world’s greater per capita consumers of newspapers, and the rapid growth and prosperity of Buenos Aires would make it exceptional in absolute terms as well. In 1928, the only three Latin American newspapers that consistently maintained daily circulation in excess of 150,000 copies were published there: La Prensa, Crítica, and La Nación.82 Even La Razón, battered by competition from Crítica for evening readers, outsold its nearest non-Argentine peer, Río de Janeiro’s A Nôite, by 10,000 issues daily.83 The gap only widened as the world economic crisis of the 1930s pushed still more Argentines into the Federal Capital and surrounding suburbs. By 1935, the city of Buenos Aires boasted just under 2.5 million inhabitants and had five daily newspapers—Crítica, Noticias Gráficas, La Prensa, La Nación, and El Mundo—each consistently selling well over 200,000 copies daily. Outside of Buenos Aires, only A Nôite maintained that circulation level. The total circulation of Buenos Aires dailies exceeded that of both Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.84 On the eve of the February 1946 elections that brought Perón to the presidency, the Buenos Aires newspaper market stood at nearly triple that of its nearest Latin American peer, Mexico City, with the city’s residents purchasing more newspapers than those of Río de Janeiro, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City combined.82
By the late 1920s the emergence of the commercial press had created a set of institutions that far exceeded in economic complexity and wealth anything that the drafters of the 1853 constitution might have imagined. The Argentine press of the nineteenth century, rooted in a tradition of factional political conflict and intimately tied to those wielding or aspiring to wield state power, had become something quite different: a capital-intensive, technologically advanced, and market-dependent commercial newspaper industry with millions of readers.
The Press as Newspaper Industry
The rapid expansion of the press in the early twentieth century not only created a quantitatively distinct set of institutions, it also engendered a profound qualitative shift in the nature and social significance of journalism. The press’s divergence from the model of factional journalism signaled a new relationship between individual newspapers and the public, one mediated by the market and in which political affinity receded in importance in favor of a broader set of appeals to potential readers. The growth of a newspaper market also carried with it a significant change in the relationship between political society and the press: by the 1920s, the owners of the nation’s premier newspapers had become largely autonomous from the factional politics and even the social classes that marked their origins. At the same time, the industrialization of the press demanded a rearticulation of newspaper relations of production, with the hand-cranked printing presses manned by nineteenth-century politician-journalists giving way to enormous mechanized rotary presses under the guidance of wage-earning printers producing the texts of increasingly specialized working journalists. More than the development of a new style of journalism, then, the emergence of the commercial press implied a profound reworking of the press’s entire network of relationships.
Where political militancy linked reader and newspaper in the tradition of factional journalism, the relationship between the commercial press and the public was mediated by a more complex amalgam of factors. By the 1920s, the appeal of the most widely read newspapers of the Argentine Republic lay less in explicitly polemical political and economic journalism that addressed the concerns of an audience segmented by partisan militancy than in more general reporting and editorials that engaged the political, work, sport, leisure, social, and cultural concerns of increasingly broad sectors of the population. Sensationalism, melodrama, and the incorporation of photographs and other graphic material in the daily press sought the attention of popular-class readers, while the physical layout and page size of newspapers like El Mundo facilitated the incorporation of reading into the routine of the urban middle- and working-class daily commute.86 In the place of specific factional sympathy, then, a more stable—and more sweeping—set of political, class, gender, cultural, and ethnic markers grew in prominence as newspaper directors aimed at generating a committed readership.
The factional newspaper’s role as public forum for partisan debate also increasingly ceded space to a more powerful form of publicity. If Argentines together consumed far more newspapers than their regional peers in the first half of the twentieth century, those living in the Argentine capital also absorbed greater quantities of a much more sophisticated set of classified and display advertising. Not only were residents of the Argentine capital considerably wealthier and more literate on average than other Latin Americans in the first half of the century, but a 1920 U.S. Department of Commerce study declared Buenos Aires “an oasis in the advertising desert” and “so far in advance of all other cities of South America in advertising development as to be in a class by itself.”87 Exposure to classified and display advertising became an integral and unavoidable part of the newspaper reading experience, in effect “educating” readers as consumers and producers even as it served as a conduit for the incorporation of consumer demands into the market.88 Commercial publicity—the “poetry of Modernity,” in the words of Henri Lefebvre—together with the breadth of newspaper reporting thus helped shape the city’s rapid economic transformation in the first decades of the century.89
Such changes signaled a fundamental shift in the practical nature of the relationship between press and public. Where nineteenth-century factional newspapers had ideally served as participatory media for communication among political militants, the scale of the twentieth-century commercial press placed newspapers before the public less as an accessible forum for expression than as an item of consumption. Similarly, even as press owners competed to sell ever-increasing numbers of newspapers to a growing