The twentieth-century Argentine commercial press thus formed part of an array of institutions whose effectiveness as bulwark of the long-term vitality of the social and political order rested on its relative autonomy from state power proper. This distance from state power proper allowed for the fragmented presence of antisystemic political and cultural discourses within the popular press, giving voice to dissident intellectuals and articulating the interests of broad sectors of the Argentine public in more immediate ways than their formal political representatives. Often while at its most confrontational with regard to state power, the commercial press helped create the kind of pluralistic—even chaotic—public sphere that seemed to confirm rather than undermine the realization of liberalism’s egalitarian promise of universal citizenship.22 As an integral component of the broader Argentine social order, the press served as a crucial forum for the articulation of normative aspects of what remained powerful ideological precepts (for example, “democracy” in the abstract) as well as their practical implications (what “democracy” meant in concrete practice). On a daily basis and usually in the most mundane ways, the commercial press of mid-twentieth-century Argentina thus repeatedly served to generate consent around the dominant ideology as “common sense” and the larger social order as “natural,” while at the same time giving voice to contestation in ways that generally tended to regenerate, rather than weaken, the legitimacy of the social order.23 As a “fourth (e)state” (cuarto estado) beyond the state, Argentine newspapers formed “part of a process by which a world-view compatible with the existing structure of power in society is reproduced, a process which is decentralized, open to contradiction and conflict, but generally very effective.”24
At the same time, the growing reading market that allowed for this relative autonomy from explicit forms of political power also fostered the emergence of newspapers as important economic entities by the 1920s, employing large numbers of journalists, graphic artists, and vendors, consuming productive inputs like newsprint and technologically advanced presses, and mediating between a broad range of producers and Argentine consumers. Just as journalism as a practice of power gains broad social significance through media institutions, media institutions themselves could not exist without newsworkers. To limit any understanding of the twentieth-century press to that of cultural institution, or to reduce newspapers to shapers of ideology and conduits for the exercise of power, is to overlook a fundamental aspect of the social reality of the modern media: the twentieth-century press is as much industry as it is culture. Not only do newspapers help produce social meaning, but people produce newspapers, through processes that involve tools, raw materials, and, from the 1880s onward, an increasingly elaborate division of labor.
Rather than simple instruments of power within the broad array of social contests, the institutions of the twentieth-century Argentine press constituted a commercial newspaper industry. As such, they were riddled not just with the tensions between the cultural/ideological and economic/productive practices of the modern press, but with the more profound struggles inherent in industrial relations of production. If, as Nord argues, the purpose of journalism “is the exercise of power,” this power is not wielded by disembodied journalists through institutions above the social order, but by real people embedded in the real social conflicts of institutions themselves embedded in the broader social order. The tumultuous history of the press in Peronist Argentina is thus one of struggles not only for control of the instruments necessary for the socially meaningful exercise of journalism’s ideological and cultural power, but within a set of institutions permeated by the more far-reaching social conflicts of modern Argentina.
Peronism and Journalism History
To examine at once the Argentine commercial press and Peronism, then, is to engage two “total” phenomena: the first, a set of fluid and internally fragmented cultural, political, and economic institutions that by the 1920s formed an integral part of the rhythms of urban life; the other, a movement inaugurating changes so dramatic as to reshape Argentina for the remainder of the century. As I show here, the Peronist relationship with the Argentine press was not a direct confrontation between two powerful historical agents, nor did it develop in linear fashion. Instead, it proceeded as an accumulation of multiple and often indirect disputes concerning the relative balance of power between newsworkers and newspaper proprietors, between individual newspaper owners, between public and press, and between state and press. It is in the course of a whole range of specific struggles like these, played out across the spectrum of Argentine society, that Peronism emerged and Peronists and non-Peronists alike forged their claims to hold the reins of power in the nation’s political, cultural, and economic institutions. It is also the convergence of these many disputes and their contingent resolutions that constitutes the sweeping transformations of the Peronist era.
The approach to journalism history that I adopt here is a pragmatic response to a surprisingly complex object of study. While historians have long relied upon newspapers as important sources for the study of the past, we have only begun to move beyond our tendency to accept them either as reflections of popular sentiment—while wrestling with the slippery question of audience reception—or as vehicles solely of elite opinion.25 Too many media scholars, in turn, accept a historically static view of the press, anthropomorphizing “the press” as a coherent collective agent while reifying the ideological underpinnings of the newspaper industry—even though the specific, practical meanings of the latter are often the fiercely contested terrain of press-related conflicts. As a result, contemporary (often North American) norms frequently serve as a de facto transhistorical yardstick in media studies, bringing researchers to see ideologically charged notions like “freedom of the press” not as the contingent products of social contests, but as concrete and stable, existing or lacking in any given time and place, at once beyond history and capable of being born, dying, and even rising from the dead.26
The wide-ranging nature of the debates as well as the depth and complexity of the conflicts examined in this book caution against these approaches. In fact, these struggles bring to the fore the historically changing character of our own understanding of what, in fact, “the press” is. In his history of violence against the press in the United States, media scholar John Nerone offers a far more useful conception of what we study when we study the press. Nerone describes the press not as a static entity, but as a multifaceted “network of relationships,” and sees violence directed against press institutions as part of episodic struggles over precisely what this network entails.27 We can go further: disputes over the press are limited neither to moments of violent confrontation nor to periods of heated public debate. Instead, these mark points of inflection in the unceasing process of reproducing this network of relationships and readjusting the relative power held by the myriad parties involved.
Rather than fundamentally stable, then, the descriptive understanding and normative nature of the press—that is, what the press is and what the press should be, respectively—are contingent elements of a whole range of disputes in a network of relationships no more static than any other set of relationships in capitalist societies. Changes in the status of newspapers as commodities, the relative importance of commercial display and classified advertising, the complexity of newsroom relations of production, press jurisprudence, and the nature of the reading public all send ripples throughout the press’s entire network of relationships. These relationships, in turn, are not above the social order. Instead, they form an integral part of more fundamental social norms and practices, embedding each newspaper institution in processes of historical change not as simple agent or object, but as an array of sites of contention.
The intricacy of the