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the fourth estate Buenos Aires. Callao and Rivadavia: “Noticias Gráficas!” “Crítica!” And the whirlwind of the newsboy’s cries —dark, dark—, that opens like a fan and invades the streets of the city: Like a lance. Like an arrow. —José Portogalo, 1935 Nothing moves in a civilized nation if the printed press does not work. . . . The highest ideals, the most honorable aspirations for the common good have been sown, cultivated, and harvested through the columns of newspapers. —La Nación, September 1, 1935 Disconcertingly well-stocked periodical kiosks crowded the sidewalks of midtwentieth -century Buenos Aires, stuffed with the enormous variety of the morning’s fruits—the afternoon’s detritus—of Latin America’s largest publishing industry. With over seven hundred different Spanish-language newspapers and magazines together with sixty-seven dailies and periodicals in Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Armenian, Greek, German, and a host of other languages, all competing for readers’ attention, the sheer volume and variety of publications could easily overwhelm any curious pedestrian.1 As two foreign journalists working at the English-language Buenos Aires Herald in the 1940s remarked, “the newsstands of Buenos Aires have for years offered a bewildering assortment of newspapers printed locally in such a babel of languages that I never did learn to recognize more than a third of them, let alone read them.”2 Earlier visitors to the city like Georges Clemenceau and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez highlighted the technological complexity and wealth of the periodical press, proclaiming newspaper institutions like La Prensa and 1 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 25 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 25 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM 26 / the fourth enemy La Nación the embodiment of an obviously vibrant and optimistic Argentine modernity.3 The rise of the Buenos Aires press in the first decades of the twentieth century marks more than a simple quantitative expansion of publishing capacity. In Argentina, as in many other parts of the world, newspapers underwent a dramatic transformation from their roots in the partisan publications of the mid–nineteenth century to emerge as a qualitatively distinct new means of social communication. The twentieth-century press, though forged in the heat of the previous century’s political agitation, was shaped less by formal partisan disputes than by a rapidly expanding market of readers and advertisers. In this new world of commercial journalism, explicit identification with a specific, politically inscribed circle of readers acted less to guarantee an audience than to constrain a newspaper’s potential market. Overt partisan militancy increasingly ceded to “general interest” reporting and class-based cultural appeals in the ceaseless effort to attract what appeared an ever-expanding readership. This transformation implied an important refashioning of the whole network of relationships that constituted the Buenos Aires press. Where partisan political engagement and journalism practice had been intimately intertwined in the nineteenth century, the proprietors and journalists of the new press professed their autonomy from the vagaries of explicit partisan interests and— most emphatically—state power. Drawing on the rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse market of readers and advertisers, the owners of the commercial press forged a new relationship not only between political society and the newspaper industry, but between individual newspapers and their readership. Press and public increasingly faced each other as commodities, their relationship driven less by partisan militancy than by the more mundane forces of market exchange. In the process, Argentina’s commercial newspapers became a particularly complex amalgam of journalistic types: the “objective ” reporting of the independent press—independent of both state power and organized political factions—allegedly mirrored reality, while editorialists sought at once to reflect and shape the interests and opinions of Argentine society as a whole.4 At the same time, the institutional structure of the press increasingly re- flected the general contours of the Argentine economy. Not only did newspaper production necessitate progressively greater investments in imported capital goods and inputs like technologically advanced rotary presses, newsprint , and ink, but the transformation of the press demanded a reworking of newspaper relations of production. In the Buenos Aires of the mid-1920s, the politician-proprietors of nineteenth-century journalism, who had founded newspapers as “combat posts” in the defense of private economic and political interests, had largely given way to journalistic entrepreneurs whose primary business interests sprang from the newspapers themselves. As the ranks of 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 26 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 26 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3...

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