Still, the division of labor in the newsroom and the commodification of journalism practice remained more ambiguous than the broader class divisions in the newspaper industry as a whole. Rather than forming independent trade unions, journalists in the city of Buenos Aires formed the mutual aid society Círculo de la Prensa in 1896, with La Nación founder Bartolomé Mitre himself serving as first president.106 For decades the Círculo remained under the explicit tutelage of newspaper proprietors: Ezequiel Paz of La Prensa and Luís Mitre of La Nación alternated in the presidency of the organization until the 1920s, when they ceded to an alternation of their respective paper’s editors and administrators.107 In addition to providing health, unemployment, and burial benefits to members, the organization served as an effective lobbying organization for the corporate interests of the newspaper industry. Thus, not only did the Círculo de la Prensa act as a watchdog regarding press issues—which, until the 1930s, remained largely confined to denunciations of censorship and harassment outside the Federal Capital—but the group pushed for greater professionalization and training among journalists.108 This latter project bore fruit under the aegis of the Universidad Nacional de la Plata and the Círculo’s sister organization, the Círculo de Periodistas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, with the founding of the country’s first formal journalism school in 1935.109
This dual push toward the independence of commercial newspapers from factional politics and the professionalization of journalism practice, however uneven it remained, corresponded to a substantive shift in the journalistic philosophy of owners of the “serious” press. Ezequiel Paz of La Prensa most forcefully articulated the characteristics of an objective journalism model, which declared accuracy of information, the absence of journalists’ subjectivity, and the clear separation of fact and opinion as the hallmarks of a proper press: “To inform with exactitude and truth; to omit nothing which the public has a right to know; to use always an impersonal and cultured form [of address] without prejudice to the severity and force of critical thought; to abandon rumor … to affirm only that which one has firm conviction from proof or documentation.”110 Similarly, journalists should remain vigilant about the insertion of opinion into reporting; otherwise they would “invade” the territory—physically demarcated in the pages of the paper—of opinion-driven editorials.111 Together with the sharp distance from formal state imperatives guaranteed by the Argentine constitution, the pages of the press would provide the necessary information through which ordinary citizens might judge the acts of government.112
Where adherence to this objectivist model of journalism reinforced the market relationship between press and public by emphasizing the consumption of accurate information as a right of citizenship, Paz maintained an equivocal stance with regard to the editorial pages of La Prensa. “The daily press,” Paz argued in 1920, “must represent public opinion.” Yet Paz continued with an important qualification: “public opinion is the general criterion in exercise of the right to judge, as much of the result as of the appropriateness of the management of issues of common order.” Public opinion depended upon a rationality, “impartiality, serenity, and culture” that the La Prensa owner maintained stood above “the rough vocabulary of the working-class neighborhood [arrabal], which pretends to be democratic, but is nothing more than the result of intransigence and ignorance.”113 Two decades later, Ángel Bohigas, vice-director of La Nación, similarly argued against the validity of the press’s direct appeals to a popular readership, since “the journalist should try to make his page get to the thinking classes of the country, to those who carry greater weight in the elucidation of affairs of public interest.”114 Through the “healthy civic propaganda” of La Prensa’s editorial pages and La Nación’s “elevated mental level,” the owners and directors of the “serious press” explicitly sought to shape public opinion, an aim that stood in tension with similarly explicit assertions of the press as a virtually unmediated expression of the broader opinion, elevated or not, of the general public.115 Similarly, Ezequiel Paz’s claims that the press represented public opinion as a whole rested uneasily with Paz’s simultaneous dismissal of the subjective views of working-class readers.
The proprietors and editors of La Prensa and La Nación—and, by extension, the leadership of the Círculo de la Prensa—embraced a vision of the press and the social role of journalism firmly rooted in nineteenth-century liberalism, but with important modifications. In this libertarian conception of the press, the negative aspects of press freedom as enshrined in the Argentine constitution—in which the press would remain free from state interference—received special emphasis; like their counterparts in the United States and Britain, proponents of the “serious press” repeatedly elevated the press as “a ‘Fourth Estate’ in the government process.”116 Yet, in its positive aspects, the conception of press freedom articulated by the proprietors of La Prensa and La Nación had undergone a crucial transformation. In both cases, the constitutional principle of the right of publication as a component of citizenship remained rhetorically powerful even as the scale of the commercial press—and the scale of the polity—eroded the practical possibilities of a universally participatory daily press. The rights of citizenship through the press instead increasingly centered upon the public’s information consumption, with the ideal of the “informed citizen” largely eclipsing notions of the universality of rights of expression. As a consequence, the accuracy and impartiality of information together with claims to represent public opinion faithfully—however ambiguous they remained alongside Ezequiel Paz’s exclusionary, class-based qualifications—became pivotal elements of legitimacy for the “serious press.”
Of the major Argentine dailies in existence prior to 1930, Crítica diverged most markedly from this journalistic model. The name of the paper and the slogan below its masthead—“God set me upon your city like a horsefly on a noble horse, to bite it and keep it awake. (Socrates)”—announced a sharp watchdog role for Botana’s newspaper, and the constant campaigns against certain public figures served in good measure to reinforce that perception. Yet the cult around the paper and its bohemian “gang of boys” (muchachada) exalted the notion of the journalist and newspaper that found little common ground with the ideals set forth by Ezequiel Paz. On the contrary, not only did Crítica journalists self-consciously portray themselves as committed and active participants in the news they were reporting, but, as often as possible, Crítica and its journalists were the news itself.117 Botana and his staff similarly sought to create a relationship, even a complicity, between reader and paper based not on rationality and appeals to elite culture, but on an emotional identification of Crítica and its journalists with the culture, poverty, and language of the urban popular classes. More than a newspaper, Crítica was “the hand for the fallen, the support for the widow and the orphan, the paternal hand for children, and the defender of the innocent.”118
If Ezequiel Paz could claim La Prensa as a faithful representative of public opinion only by dismissing as irrelevant the language and interests of a significant portion of that public, Botana sought discursively to dissolve the boundaries between Crítica and the very public Paz discarded. In reassuring readers that commercial success would not change their “friendship,” the journalists at Crítica went beyond asserting that they “thought with the mind of the people” to cultivate an affective identification between the paper and the urban popular classes.119 Upon the move to Avenida de Mayo 1333, the paper’s journalists blurred any substantive distinction between the popular reading public and what had become a significant commercial enterprise: “If at some time you need the loyal advice or help of a friend, come to CRITICA as if to a common home, assured that the doors of our house will only be closed to domination, abuse or injustice. Reader and newspaper, we form, in sum,