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journalism as labor power What interests journalists is that we are finally recognized as possessing the same right to demand better working conditions as all [other] workers. —Octavio Palazzolo of the Argentine Federation of Journalists We consider it the greatest and most prejudicial of errors any attempt to consider the journalist an intellectual worker. —Alberto Gainza Paz, La Prensa, February 22, 1944 In the first months following the coup of June 1943, the government of General Ramírez had found its primary source of legitimacy in the profound public discontent with the political corruption of the preceding thirteen years. Yet, by defining their overriding mission as the cleansing of political life, the military leaders had undermined the validity of an indefinite perpetuation of the government: either they succeeded in this dubious task and retreated to the barracks as promised, or they attempted to maintain their hold on power, implicitly admitting failure. Without a new course and a redefinition of goals, then, the longevity of the military regime depended more on enforcing passive silence than on generating active consent among the general population. The emergence of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón as the regime’s clear protagonist within the newly reconfigured cabinet was an implicit acknowledgment that the clumsy authoritarianism of the military regime had reached its limits. Perón, more than any other government figure, not only perceived this contradiction between the regime’s contingent legitimacy and the military leaders’ greater, unstated aspirations, he began to envision the solution to the predicament: the creation and maintenance of an active base of support for the military government through a sweeping program of social reform. Although initiated in November 1943 following Perón’s appointment as head of the then 4 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 116 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 116 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM journalism as labor power / 117 innocuous National Labor Department, this significantly more ambitious project deepened substantially with Ramírez’s ouster in late February of the following year. If the New Year’s press decree embodied these tensions between the repressive program of the regime and its failure to generate positive support among influential sectors of the population, the circumstances of its abrogation three months later exemplify the course that Farrell and Perón charted through this impasse. In attempting to normalize what were by definition exceptional measures taken in exceptional circumstances, decree 18.407 mandated passivity rather than organized consensus for the regime, and, as a consequence, served as much to provoke as to silence dissent within the national media. On March 28, 1944, however, Farrell revoked the decree, replacing it with a fundamentally different measure that signaled a new approach to state-press relations. Decree 7.618/44, the Journalist’s Statute (Estatuto del Periodista), far from systematizing stringent prohibitions on reporting, instead established strong government assurances of concrete improvements in journalists’ working conditions . With the simultaneous abrogation of decree 18.407, censorship once again became a temporary emergency power of the state. The focus of permanent state intervention in the functioning of the press, in turn, suddenly shifted from an ominous vigilance over newspaper content to a positive enforcement of social justice for newsworkers. Journalists greeted the measure with a fervor that quickly extended to the decree’s sponsors within the military government. Censorship alone had opened the regime to claims that its authority rested solely upon the power of coercion; now, however, the military government sought to generate the active support of the direct producers of press content. Despite its profound impact on the internal workings of the newspaper industry , the Journalist’s Statute has appeared as little more than a footnote in the historiographies of Argentine labor, the press, and law. Such inattention to the material and professional-ideological conditions of journalism practice is hardly unique to considerations of the Argentine press, as several historical studies of newsworkers in the United States attest.1 This oversight has much to do with journalists’ professional ideology and the nature of journalism itself ; in fact, ambivalent perceptions of journalistic activity as labor formed an integral part of the conflict surrounding the statute. Thus, while the political environment in which the press functions has received media historians’ ample attention, the human relational context of the newspaper production processmoreoftenthannotremainscuriouslyopaque .2 Similarly,thecomparatively small number of journalists, together with their relative social mobility and educational level, has marginalized working journalists from the extensive studies...

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