Media's defense to social scientist's charge of hegemony

Résumé En

In 1996, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was invited to take part to Arrêt sur image (« Freeze Frame »), a television show broadcasted on the French channel 5 without knowing yet he would rekindle the controversy on the media's ability to play the rôle of counter-power. The program, originally created by the journalist Daniel Schneidermann, was aimed at critically analyzing the way TV media covers news. After the show, Bourdieu expressed his disappointment in his book Sur la Télévision (About Television) and worried that this kind of programs fails to deliver on its promises. Three years later, Schneidermann, replied with his essay Le journalisme après Bourdieu (The journalism after Bourdieu), by emphasizing the effectiveness of the 'fourth estate' in the contemporary democracies. But it seems that there is no consensus regarding this point in the media sector: Pierre Carles continued the debate in his documentary Enfin pris' (« Caught in the act'») and supported Bourdieu's criticisms against Schneidermann's advocacy. The problem is not to look at the relations between the sociologist and television but to explore how media argue in favour of their own transparence, its countervailing power and défend themselves against criticism. Indeed, media often are on a hot seat and have to persuade the wide public that they are independent from authorities and financial interests groups. This is even more needed that the suspicion of collusion is a recurrent theme of the critical media analysis and is by no means confined to the French situation, knowing that the project of a 'political economy of the mass media' by Edward Herman and Noam Chosmky (1988) seems to go in the same direction. In this paper, we would like to rethink the controversy around Bourdieu's position by highlighting the efforts and resources mobilised by media to legitimate themselves. It is particularly relevant to investigate how the sector uses the argument that media are necessarily free in a democracy. In the other hand, to what extent the denunciation of 'conspiracy theory' is employed against social scientists who lend credence to hegemony' Indeed, this controversy raises to the issue of the ambiguous power of communication. Basically, journalists use to advocate the idea that each citizen in a democracy is able and allowed to refuse an information knowing that media is pluralistic if not independent. Maybe the difficulty for Bourdieu, Chomsky and their followers in front of this argument leads us back to Herbert Marcuse's concept of 'repressive tolerance' (1965) and underlines its strenght. Thus, it looks like a big challenge to resist to the power of communication: this one is even more strong that it claims to the principles of freedom (free will, free choice, free dialogue) and non-violence. On the contrary, if some scholars consider hegemony, it is easy for media to denounce non-sense and abusive allegation. Our paper is aimed to show the confrontation between the rhetoric strategies around the media contribution to democracy (which guarantees the right to resist) or hegemony (which prevents resistance).