Authoritarianism and entertainment in the beginnings of the nationalization of television in Argentina: Channel 7 of Buenos Aires during Onganía’s presidency

Abstract

The aim of the work is to understand how the official media policy of the Onga-nía government prior to the Cordobazo implied a first and forceful attempt to stop the expansion of private television and the beginning of a statizing trend. The article addresses, on the one hand, the transformations in the state media structure and the subsequent administrative decisions that impacted on the state television signal; and on the other hand, the programming grid, which allows us to make inferences both regarding the social uses defined for the state signal, as well as the links established with different actors for the achievement of those uses. The work offers a new sight at the cultural policy of Onganía, revealing the government’s emphasized interest in the possibilities of television in the media-tion of politics. The hypothesis of the article is that the expansion of the state presence on television required considering an already consolidated field regarding its rules, actors and positions. Thus, the result was a complex experience, disputed by different groups within the State and with important conflicts and articulations with the entrepreneurship, which tried to combine authoritarian, hierarchical and paternalistic political domination with mass entertainment.