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The research and writing of this book are bracketed by two events, one in Argentina , the other in Venezuela. While neither is directly related to the history of journalism in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, both bear upon my own approach to the topic in ways that deserve to be made explicit. This is more than an affirmation of the Crocean dictum that “all history is contemporary history”; it is also a confession of just how much the ghosts of the past haunt my understanding of the present. At about the same time that I boarded a plane in San Francisco to return to Buenos Aires and begin my initial research on the Argentine press, hired gunmen stopped a small car on a highway near the resort town of Pinamar in the province of Buenos Aires and brutally assassinated its driver. For the next two years, monthly marches denouncing that January 1997 murder brought tens of thousands of Argentines into the already chaotic streets of Buenos Aires. Public outrage only increased as forensic teams performed first one and then another autopsy, while indications that the police of the province of Buenos Aires had destroyed crucial evidence at the crime scene drew public suspicion to the very organization in charge of the investigation. At first, a simple black-and-white photograph of the victim found its way into every public corner of the city; within months, the eyes alone had become ubiquitous. The little-known José Luís Cabezas, handcuffed to the steering column of his car and shot twice before his assassins doused him with gasoline and set fire to his corpse, became a powerful and immediately recognizable symbol of both the disturbingly enduring legacy of state terrorism and the total impunity that powerful criminal interests seemed to enjoy in President Carlos Menem’s Argentina. Yet this still contentious case has an added element which, unlike the arguably even more serious crimes that jolted the country in those years, assured sustained media attention: Cabezas, a photojournalist, was clearly killed for exercising his profession. For the nation’s media workers, this was more than the murder of a man obviously dearly loved by his family, friends, and coworkers . The assassination of a colleague “in the line of duty” was compounded by a level of symbolic violence against Cabezas clearly intended to silence not just him, but all Argentine journalists. Preface and Acknowledgments 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd ix 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd ix 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM x / preface and acknowledgments The killing, however, did just the opposite. Instead, it sparked heated public debates over the rights and obligations of journalists and newsworkers in Argentine society and the appropriate relationship between economic power, political power, and media power in a constitutional democracy. Moving beyond abstract affirmations, these controversies also challenged working journalists and media proprietors on the degree to which journalism and media practices conformed to these ideals. These same broader media issues became explicitly contentious once again as I was engaged in shaping that initial research into the present text, though within a different public and on a grander scale. In May 2007, Venezuela’s oldest and most watched television station, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), went off the air. Long a forum for virulent criticism of president Hugo Chávez, the station had served as a basic point of reference for the Venezuelan opposition , and its owner, Marcel Granier, had become one of the country’s more visible anti-Chávez public figures. To RCTV supporters, the station’s inability to broadcast is yet more proof that the “Bolivarian Revolution” is little more than an anachronistic dictatorship set on violating the essential constitutional and human rights of opponents. Chávez silenced RCTV for no other reason, they claim, than his recognition of the threat that freedom of expression and public access to accurate information pose to his authoritarian ambitions. Supporters of the Chávez government paint a different picture. They argue that the station did not go off the air by dictatorial fiat, but by the perfectly proper unwillingness of the country’s constitutional authorities to rubberstamp the renewal of a state-granted broadcast license whose expiration had been determined five decades earlier. For Venezuelan authorities, the crucial support that RCTV gave to conspirators in the April 2002 coup attempt, its repeated incitation to violence during the crisis, and the deliberate misinformation the station broadcast during the upheaval had long placed the station...

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