Diesel, motorists and CNews: who manufactures "common sense"?

According to RFI, the government has, since Sunday 1 November, released part of the strategic diesel reserves "to relieve motorists". Around 10 million barrels will be put on the market gradually over three months, with an expected drop of 12 to 18 centimes per litre. That's the facts. The rest is our reading.

The dispatch says nothing about the petition demanding that CNews be removed from the National Assembly's list. We do not know here the number of signatories, the exact text or the list in question, and we will invent nothing. But the connection is less artificial than it looks, because both stories raise the same question: who decides what goes without saying?

Look at the opening phrase. "Relieving motorists" designates a universal subject, the driver, whose pain at the pump is supposed to be everyone's. Whoever has no car, or cannot afford to change one, disappears from the picture. This is how common sense works: you are not asked to agree, you are placed within the frame in which disagreement becomes odd. The reasonable adult in this story is the reasonable motorist, and the measure is the gesture of a prudent head of household.

A far-right opinion channel works precisely this terrain, continuously and at high volume. Its power lies not only in what it asserts, but in what it installs as obvious: which subjects make "the news", which guests are "common sense", which anger is legitimate. In the Gramscian tradition, this is the very definition of hegemony: an order accepted as normal because its ideas have become everyone's. The media are its trenches.

The petition, then, reads less as a demand for gagging than as a challenge to that status. Appearing on the Assembly's list means receiving a label of institutional normality, a seat at the table of ordinary interlocutors. Asking for it to be removed means asking the institution to stop vouching for a framing. There remains the trap, which the signatories surely know: if everything is played out through exclusion, the channel is handed the role of martyr and the manufacture of consent is left intact.

The war of position, for its part, requires more patience. It needs media, collectives, organic intellectuals capable of saying differently what matters: the price of diesel, yes, but also who pays for the transition, who has no car, who owns the airwaves. Dominant ideas are those of whoever controls the means of spreading them; removing a channel from a list does not change that property relationship.

Ultimately, the petition has the merit of asking the right question, which is not "should it be silenced?" but "why does this frame seem natural to us?" The 12 to 18 centimes will be felt at the pump. Common sense, far less so, and that is precisely why it governs.