BFM TV: 160 staff denounce a drift, management responds with a barometer

According to Libération, more than 160 people have signed a letter addressed to the management of BFM TV and to its owner, the CMA Media group, denouncing a "slow ideological drift". The paper's headline cites three markers: Trappes, the demonstrations and the far right. At a meeting with journalists on Monday 2 November, the editorial management promised the introduction of safeguards, including "a barometer". We know no more than that: the detailed content of the letter, the exact nature of the promised tool and its timetable do not appear in the agency report we have.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the word "barometer". It is delicious. When a newsroom complains of an ideological slope, it is handed a measuring instrument, as if the problem lay in a faulty thermometer rather than in the temperature of the room. The vocabulary is that of technical neutrality: we no longer discuss what is shown, whom we invite and which framing prevails; we count. Yet counting presupposes deciding first what deserves to be counted, and that decision is precisely where the conflict lies.

The conflict, precisely, is one over common sense. For Gramsci, a ruling class holds less through coercion than through consent: its view of the world ends up passing for plain obviousness. The media are one of the trenches of this war of position. A rolling news channel, which fills its airtime twelve hours a day with studio panels and on-screen captions, manufactures obviousness in bulk: which subjects are "social issues", which suburbs are a "problem", which demonstrations are first and foremost a nuisance to traffic. When 160 employees write that this obviousness is sliding to the right, they are not merely denouncing a line; they are contesting that it is natural.

This is where the letter becomes interesting: it comes from the inside. These employees are the people who, every day, carry out the house sense of common sense. That some of them contest it resembles what Gramsci called a crack in the bloc: professional intellectuals, often classed as neutral, remember that they work for someone.

That someone is a conglomerate. Dominant ideas tend to be those of the people who own the means of mental production, the Marxist tradition reminds us; this implies no conspiracy, only a structure in which ownership has the final say. Within that framework, the editorial management plays the role of the "reasonable adult": it listens, promises, equips. Note that the discussion is taking place between newsroom and management, whereas the letter is also addressed to the shareholder, whose response is not reported.

Whether the barometer will measure practices or reassure consciences remains to be seen. Without real journalistic power over the line, it risks being just one more dial on a dashboard whose steering wheel is held by others.