Strike at Le Monde and Le Nouvel Obs: who makes the news, and for whom?

According to Le Monde, staff at the Groupe Le Monde and "Le Nouvel Obs" are on strike this Thursday, 5 November, at the call of the unions. The daily is publishing on its website the statement from the unions and the employees, presented as "their text". That is what we know. The report we have before us does not detail the demands, the number of strikers, or any announced follow-up. We will not invent them.

What remains is what the event itself says, and what the publishing arrangement implies. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the scene has its bite: a newspaper reporting on a strike by its own staff. Here is a press company finding itself, for once, in the position of its usual subjects. Every day it decides who is "the striker" and who is "the commuter held hostage", who is "reasonable" and who is "blocking". Today it is the object of the story. It will be interesting to see whether the vocabulary changes when the conflict unfolds inside the newsroom.

Next, the decision to publish the full statement, without any visible commentary, is worth noting. It is a form of correction, even of elegance. But the neutrality of a dry headline ("Statement from the unions and employees") is itself a posture: the institution keeps hold of the frame, the placement and the timing of the strikers' words.

This is where Gramsci's framework is useful. Hegemony is a power exercised as much through consent as through coercion: a worldview becomes common sense, and the existing order appears natural. The media are one of its trenches. Yet those who produce this common sense are first of all employees, who sell their labour power to companies whose owners control the means of production, and here the means of producing ideas. When these employees stop work, the consent factory suddenly looks like just a factory.

That is not to say journalists are mere cogs, nor that their articles are lies. Ideology is not falsehood; it is a partial picture presented as universal. The useful question therefore remains: who benefits from a given self-evident truth? And what place do working conditions, capital ownership and editorial independence hold in what readers take to be "information"?

We do not yet know what the strikers are demanding. That will weigh heavily: a dispute over pay, over organisation, over governance or over automation does not say the same thing about the balance of power. The text will need to be read, then we will see what management does with it, and how the rest of the press covers it. Nothing quite reminds you that common sense has workers too, and that they, too, have an opinion.