CNews and its frequency: the war of position is also being fought at the Arcom

According to Libération, CNews, which the paper describes as an "far-right media outlet", does not meet any of the criteria the Arcom (the French broadcasting regulator) sets for awarding a frequency. A petition with more than 500,000 signatures demands its removal. Libération argues that the channel would be better off on social media, where it could carry on with its "caricatures of journalism". What the Arcom will do, we don't know: the news agency dispatch says nothing about any forthcoming decision.

From here on, this is our reading, not an established fact.

One can treat the affair as a technical dossier: specifications, pluralism, compliance. This is the reassuring register of the administration, where everyone plays the sensible grown-up. But a terrestrial frequency is a public resource lent to a private operator, and the choice of who receives it is anything but neutral. The state, by handing out the channels, decides which voices will look like normality: the ones you find on the remote control, between two channels everyone knows.

This is where the notion of hegemony becomes useful. Gramsci described it as a power that holds as much through consent as through coercion: a ruling class prevails when its worldview becomes common sense, when the existing order simply appears normal. The media are the trenches of this war of position. A rolling news channel does slow, daily undermining work: it does not persuade through a grand speech, it installs a backdrop, words, self-evident truths. That is its effectiveness, and it is what makes the petition interesting: 500,000 people are saying that this backdrop is not theirs.

But let us be careful, for the trap is double. Demanding that the state withdraw a frequency also means relying on its arbitration, the very apparatus that distributed the channels according to its own balances. The same machinery that judges the channel today could tomorrow judge other voices less comfortable to it. And Libération's argument, sending CNews off to social media, has something comical about it: as if platforms, owned by a handful of private groups, were a neutral zone where whatever is inconvenient gets relegated, rather than another front in the same battle.

Dominant ideas, Marxist tradition reminds us, belong to those who control the means of mental production. The debate over the frequency therefore does not only ask whether a channel meets certain criteria. It asks who owns the apparatus, who regulates it, and in the name of what "common sense" it is removed or left in place.

Counter-hegemony, for its part, is not signed up for online: it is built, with institutions, with journalists rooted in the communities they cover, with media that do not need permission to exist. A petition is a healthy symptom; it is not yet a project.