After Trappes, the rolling news channels face the mirror they hold up to others

According to Mediapart, in the wake of the Trappes attack, reporters at the rolling news channels find themselves on the front line facing the anger aimed at the TV studios, which are accused of feeding the rise of racism. These journalists are calling on their profession to engage in some soul-searching. But, again according to Mediapart, the call struggles to be heard by management, who are reluctant to reduce the space given over to opinion.

The details of these testimonies, the number of reporters concerned and the responses from management do not appear in the summary we have, so we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The scene is instructive. Those who receive the insults at the microphone, out in the field, are not the ones who build the set of the studio. The reporter takes the anger; the studio keeps the audience. The division of labour is almost too neat: for some the mud, for others the armchair.

One can read in it an illustration of what Gramsci called hegemony: a power exercised less through coercion than through consent, when a particular worldview ends up passing for plain common sense. The media are, he said, the trenches of the war of position. Yet what is a rolling opinion panel, if not a factory of common sense at high speed? After an attack, the same faces are usually summoned, who explain what "people think" before people have had time to think it. The framing presents itself as neutral, that is to say as the framing of the reasonable adult who finally dares to "say how it is".

This is where the notion of ideology, understood not as a lie but as a partial picture of society presented as universal, serves as a compass. The point is not to claim that every guest is lying. The point is to ask who benefits from a frame in which certain questions are asked every evening and others never are, and who owns the means of producing this mental output. The rolling news channels belong to groups whose interests are not those of the neighbourhoods they comment on. That is not a detail; it is the structure.

The panels are full of intellectuals, in the Gramscian sense: professionals of opinion who organise consent. Most are "traditional" intellectuals, who believe themselves independent of class relations when they are one of its cogs. That reporters are asking their own profession to account for itself is a sign. But soul-searching cannot be decreed against an economic model: opinion costs little and draws an audience, while the field costs a great deal and causes trouble.

What remains to be seen is how the managers will respond. At this stage, nothing suggests they are questioning the place of opinion. For a hegemon, giving up its common sense would be a most unreasonable sacrifice.