Four interrelated processes helped create these circumstances. First, the industrialization of newspaper production produced a press clearly different from that envisioned in classical liberalism, as newspaper institutions became increasingly capital-intensive, profit-oriented organizations. The potentially exclusionary implications of this process for the universal practice of public expression and the distorting power that commercial interests might exert on the means of social communication became important elements in criticism of the press as early as the 1910s. Allegations that the “marketplace of ideas” had degenerated into nothing more than a market in commodities and audiences only increased in the crises of the 1930s and 1940s, setting important precedents and providing useful fodder for subsequent Peronist critiques.40
Yet two other elements of this industrialization also played crucial roles in shaping the Peronist transformation of the commercial press: the increasingly clear and elaborate division of labor in the newspaper industry, and the growing importance of newspapers as economic entities. In the course of the 1930s, disputes within newspaper institutions between newsworkers and proprietors emerged into the open, while the worldwide newsprint crisis in the wake of World War II aggravated both those conflicts as well as the competition between newspapers. By the time of Perón’s ascent, then, the industrialization of the Argentine press had produced a triple fissure: between conceptions of the press as a vehicle of general public expression and the private, capital-intensive and commercial nature of the newspaper industry; between labor and capital within the press; and between those newspaper institutions with access to increasingly scarce and expensive newsprint and those that approached bankruptcy.
Second, the economic crisis of the 1930s, together with the post–World War II restructuring of the world economy, brought a dramatic expansion of the legitimate realm of state activity, fundamentally shifting a view of the proper balance between public and private realms that had achieved broad consensus within the Argentine political class. In the course of the Depression, consensus grew within the Argentine political class for the expansion of state intervention throughout the economy as the primary corrective factor to the domestic impact of a world market in disarray and as a mediator between different sectors of capital.41 The political crises of the 1930s and the multiple threats posed by the world war only boosted state coordination of the economy and lent weight to state intervention in information circulation (through censorship) and production (as wartime propaganda). Increasingly, traditional liberal claims that the state stood as the primary threat to the functioning of the press shared space with pragmatic appeals to the state’s capacity to insulate sectors of the newspaper industry from the devastating effects of postwar economic restructuring. Many began to argue that the state, rather than being a categorical menace, could protect the press’s proper mission from the far greater threats of irresponsible commercialism, monopoly formation, and financial ruin.
Third, the rise of the Argentine urban working class as a significant political force reshaped notions of the proper social role of the press and the ability to exercise the power of journalism in meaningful ways. The new style of politics that this rise inaugurated had at its core broader conceptions of the nature of citizenship and representation and, relatedly, emphasized the importance of the state as a mediator between collective and individual interests. As Daniel James has so convincingly argued, the basis of Perón’s power lay in “his capacity to recast the whole issue of citizenship within a new social context.”42 In relation to the press, this renegotiation of the meanings of citizenship included assertions of the rights of Argentine workers to continuously articulate their aspirations, interests, and daily life through the means of social communication in ways that at once incorporated and transcended liberal notions of individual freedom of expression.43
Rather than negating traditional conceptions of the press as a vehicle for the citizen’s constitutional right of expression and as an embodiment of public opinion, Peronists built upon them. Perón and his followers argued that the problem with the press lay less in the century-old liberal norms of journalism practice than in the refusal of newspaper owners to adhere to those norms in ways that recognized the increasing breadth of the Argentine polity. While proprietors unceasingly invoked the expression of public opinion in their newspapers as the cornerstone to press legitimacy, Peronists added a crucial caveat: the commercial press failed to embody that aspiration in practice, serving instead simply to “publicize the private opinion of newspaper owners.” This failure points directly to a long-standing fissure between public and press that finally revealed itself with the sudden, unexpected political protagonism of a crucial section of that public. In explaining the unanimity of newspaper opposition to Perón in October 1945—just as popular support for the colonel became impossible to ignore—metalworker Ángel Perelman declared that “having neither means nor form of expressing ourselves, we [workers] did not constitute ‘public opinion.’”44 The gap between formal citizenship (full and equal membership in “the public”) and the obviously unequal distribution of wealth and the exercise of power in Argentina would find its promised bridge, supporters of Perón argued, not just in the “social justice” policies of the Peronist state, but in the representation of working class interests in the pages of the daily press—provided that journalists faithfully fulfilled their true mission.
Finally, the growing political polarization of the 1930s became, in the following decade, what Tulio Halperín Donghi has evocatively called a guerra civil larvada—civil war in gestation, or veiled civil war.45 Yet it was more than the depth of the cleavages that had opened within Argentine society that facilitated and even encouraged the instrumentalization of the more utopian elements of Peronist discourse in the struggles over the press: Peronists had also quickly come to control all three branches of a vastly more powerful Argentine state. It is within these conditions of unprecedented political dominance that Perón deftly managed to use long-running labor disputes within the newspaper industry, competition among different newspapers, the perception of an Argentine public sphere held captive by private interests, and the growing legitimacy of state economic interventionism to wholly refashion the Argentine media. This transformation culminated in the congressional expropriation of La Prensa in 1951.
Part 1 of this study examines the rise of the modern Argentine press from the period following the battle of Caseros (1852) through the multiple crises of 1930 to 1943. The rapid expansion of the Buenos Aires press transformed its nature: as capitalist relations of production came to dominate the newsroom, conflicts of interest emerged between a new class of professional journalists and the owners of newspapers, undermining notions of “the press” as an internally unified institution. Similarly, the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the newspaper industry began to belie the notion of press freedom as a universal right, while the growing economic weight of the newspaper industry threatened to undermine in important ways the nineteenth-century juridical and ideological foundations upon which the relationship between press, state, and public stood.
Chapter 1 examines the transition from the small partisan press of the nineteenth century to the massive commercial newspaper industry of twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Chapter 2 looks more closely at three particular aspects of the commercial press in the crises of political and economic liberalism in the 1930s: the resurgence of partisan journalism, though now in hybrid form; the increasingly complex state/press relations of that decade; and the unionization drive of Argentine journalists.
The press policies of the military regime (1943–46) that gave birth to the Peronist movement are the topic of part 2. Beyond rapidly expanding state authority in the realm of information production and dissemination, military reformers also fundamentally revised juridical definitions of the nature of the press, recognizing newspapers as commercial institutions and the newsroom as a site of class conflict. In addition, the sudden articulation by military officials of notions of citizenship centered on social rights implied a substantive change in conceptions of the proper relationships between the press, civil society, and the state. The dual fissure that had begun to emerge in the course of the 1930s now suddenly became impossible to ignore: the growing rift between working journalists and newspaper proprietors belied the coherence of the press as a unified collective subject;