Nonetheless, the conflicts surrounding the press in the 1930s that first drew my attention had not only failed to reach even tentative resolution by the beginning of Perón’s ascent in 1943, but they escalated with ever-increasing urgency with the Peronist transformation of Argentine society. Like many other historians of Argentina, I was pulled by the sheer gravity of the Peronist era—reluctantly at first, enthusiastically later—into its orbit. When I turned my attention to the press conflicts of the Perón years, however, I did so with the great advantage of having already seen the opening of multiple fissures in the Argentine newspaper industry over the course of the previous decades. In fact, it is the particular form of the Peronist engagement with these gestating conflicts that not only shaped the fate of the commercial press in the years 1946 to 1955, but constituted an important component of Peronism’s rapid evolution into the nation’s dominant political force.
In placing the battles surrounding the newspaper industry in Peronist Argentina within the greater trajectory of Argentine journalism history, then, I am responding less to a search for origins than to a recognition of what this approach reveals about the commercial press, Peronism, and mid-twentieth-century Argentina. The story of the transformation of the Argentine press between 1946 and 1955 emerges in its full complexity only when considered not merely as a consequence of the rise of Peronism or as an aspect of the Peronist experience, but also as a moment in the longer historical development of the Argentine press. Examining the Argentine press within the whirlwind of Peronism’s emergence makes apparent the complexity of the newspaper industry’s internal tensions, the intricacy of its interactions with other aspects of Argentine life, and the ambiguity of its ideological bases.14 The conflicts of the Peronist era, in effect, reveal “the press” not as a static, unified, and monolithic entity, but as an internally divided array of institutions and a historically fluid set of less formal social relationships.
Similarly, these struggles belie any conception of Peronism as a singular movement responding to the preconceived designs of its founder and leader. A clearer understanding of the social history of Argentine journalism casts new light on the ways in which the heterogeneous ideological, political, social, and economic components of a frequently improvised and contentious political practice evolved in tense interaction not just with each other, but with the surprisingly resilient residual elements of liberal Argentina. To paraphrase The Eighteenth Brumaire, the protagonists of this story made their own history, but they did not make it as they pleased; they did so within the confines and opportunities inherited from deeply rooted historical circumstances. The story of journalism in this period illuminates the degree to which Perón and his followers built the “New Argentina”—and the Peronist movement itself—from the ideological and institutional debris of an old order that had begun to crumble from its own internal fissures more than a decade earlier, but whose definitive collapse remained stubbornly elusive.
Journalism and Power
In an initial impassioned plea and through his subsequent scholarship, David Paul Nord has long urged his more methodologically conservative colleagues to recognize that the “fundamental purpose of mass communication, and especially journalism, is the exercise of power.”15 Yet it is also clear that the discursive and textual practices of twentieth-century journalism can become socially meaningful only in relation to the productive infrastructure and distributive capacity of media institutions. As the media conflicts of mid-twentieth-century Argentina demonstrate, struggles for hegemony are over not only the mobilizing potential of ideas, but control of the material and institutional means necessary to forge the level of social consensus that hegemony entails. Underpinning this study of the specific conflicts surrounding journalism and the press in a decisive period of modern Argentine history are a more fundamental set of concerns and a more ambitious agenda: in the broadest sense, this book is an attempt to trace concretely the dialectical relationship between contests for the exercise of power and the institutions of civil society—that is, between struggles for hegemony and battles for control of the instruments through which hegemonic power is established, defended, contested, and perpetually reshaped.16
The importance of print media in Argentine daily life and their centrality for the fashioning of multiple forms of power also ensured that newspaper institutions would emerge as major battlegrounds—often literally—in the political, ideological, and cultural conflicts of the Peronist years. The Argentine capital in the mid–twentieth century was a world in which the media’s permeation of everyday life was not only well underway, but increasingly rapid. Both urgent and ubiquitous, newspapers formed an integral part of the urban landscape, adorning the hands of pedestrians, job seekers, and subway and streetcar riders. At once symbols of the city’s cosmopolitan character and catalysts for the nation’s economic modernization, newspapers were also ephemeral. Discarded and disintegrating, dirty and crumpled on the city streets, by late afternoon the morning papers had already ceded their place to the evening dailies to assume a different role in the urban landscape as commonplace markers of the accelerating pace of modern life.
Though the growth of the press in the city of Buenos Aires overshadows that in the cities and towns of the Argentine interior, newspapers became an important part of daily life for Argentines across the nation. Between the mid-1880s and the 1930s the Argentine public ranked near the top in world per capita newspaper consumption.17 As a result, the press played an increasingly important role in shaping both the mundane and extraordinary lived experience of what Beatriz Sarlo has aptly called Argentina’s “peripheral modernity.”18 In the pages of popular dailies like Crítica and Noticias Gráficas, global culture, politics, and sports intersected with local concerns, while the divisions blurred between world and national events, public and private lives. Even the ritual of purchasing a newspaper, performed by few peoples anywhere more often than by Argentines, not only helped mark the rhythms of everyday life in the Argentine capital, it helped mold readers’ collective and individual cultural, political, ethnic, gender, and class identities.19
More explicitly and insistently than most other commodities, newspapers served as an instrument for the creation of meaning and hierarchy regarding broad swaths of social, political, and cultural life. Indeed, the heterogeneity of newspaper content and the ubiquity of newspapers made the press a meaning-creating link between the minutiae of everyday life, the shifting events of city, nation, and world, and the abstract, universalizing expressions of the dominant ideology. This crucial role in the creation of meaning for such large sectors of the population makes the press an essential element of the shifting “structure of feeling” in modern Argentina; or, as James Carey has stated more emphatically, “journalism not only reveals the structure of feeling of previous eras, it is the structure of feeling of past eras, or at least significant portions of it.”20
While Argentina did boast a vibrant partisan press in the first decades of the century, between 1880 and 1920 partisan proprietor-journalists largely gave way to politically and economically independent newspaper entrepreneurs tied not to specific political factions, but to the market. The size and diversity of the Argentine newspaper market facilitated an enormous degree of economic independence for the nation’s press, with the owners of even medium-sized newspapers capable of maintaining themselves beholden primarily to the reading public and private advertisers rather than to state institutions and explicit forms of political power. Directors of the large commercial newspapers still regularly placed their papers’ weight behind specific political figures, parties, and programs. Yet these endorsements