Claridad’s campaign against Crítica and pig-like concessions to the mob’s bad taste

Abstract

Between 1926 and 1928, in the pages of the port-city magazine Claridad, there was a strong smear campaign against one of the then most important newspapers in Buenos Aires: Crítica. The disputes between the Boedo and Florida groups; the controversies around language and the judgments awakened by slang, as a literary language; the disputes about the role that mass media is called to fulfill in relation to a new and broader horizon of readers; and the moral derivations involved with the exercise of a particular form of journalism and literature; all of this frames the conflict which erupted between Zamora’s publication and Botana’s newspaper. In the present work,Claridad’s different interventions in the controversy are analyzed in order to assess the role played there by the different positions with respect to language and literary and / or journalistic speech.