BFMTV: journalists strike against the studio set-up that makes them look like brutes

According to Mediapart, journalists at BFMTV have launched a strike described as unprecedented. They are asking management to better police discriminatory remarks made on set and to give field reports back their place on air. The new show "100% Mabrouk" has drawn a good share of the criticism, but the strikers insist, still according to Mediapart, that the issue goes beyond that one programme. The article's own headline sums up their grievance: "Les propos en plateau, on les paie cash sur le terrain" ("The things said on set, we pay for in cash out in the field"). We do not have the detail of the demands, the participation figures or management's response here: we will need to come back to them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

You could see this as a row over programming, but it touches on something else: the manufacture of common sense. For Gramsci, domination does not rest on force alone. It rests on partial ideas ending up passing for self-evident truth, and the media are one of the trenches where this war of position is fought. A rolling news studio is a formidable machine for producing the obvious: a set, a sofa, a tone of "plain speaking" and, very quickly, the notion that an opinion delivered with brio is worth as much as a verified fact. The one who talks is the "realist"; the one who worries is the "preachy know-it-all."

The strikers remind us of something newsroom bosses are happy to forget: this common sense has material consequences. The reporter is not in the studio. He is outside the door, facing the people who were talked about the night before. He picks up the bill for remarks he never made. The phrase "on paie cash" captures the division of labour well: the commentary goes to one person, the bill to another.

That division has a history. Marx described how, in the factory, science and command of the process separated from manual labour to become the power of capital over the worker. Transpose with care: in a newsroom, the reporter's craft, slow, costly and rooted in place, is pushed to one side in favour of cheap, interchangeable studio content that fills airtime. The know-how of field journalists weighs little against the machinery of the flow. Demanding more reporting is therefore demanding that those who produce the news keep a hand on what it says.

One could also see in them, if one likes, "organic" intellectuals of an unexpected kind. Not tribunes, but salaried workers in the business of making meaning who refuse to be its foot soldiers. That this takes the form of a strike, a tool of the labour movement more than of the profession, is no accident.

Two questions remain that the wire report does not settle. Who, in the chain of command, decides what counts as "moderate" on set? And will the shareholder, whose interest lies first in ratings, hear anything other than noise? History will tell whether common sense comes back from the field.