Petition against CNews: 600,000 voices, but the National Assembly doesn't hold the key

According to Le Monde, a petition calling for CNews to be shut down has passed 600,000 signatures. Under the rules of the National Assembly, the France's lower house of parliament, a debate on the floor of the chamber can be organised once a petition exceeds 500,000 signatures from 30 different departments. But a committee must first decide whether to classify the petition or examine it. Nothing is therefore guaranteed: at this stage, we do not know whether the debate will take place, or in what form.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. And first, a point of institutional plumbing: even if the deputies take it up, they will not shut anything down. The power to sanction broadcasters belongs to the Arcom, the French broadcasting regulator, not to the chamber. The promised debate therefore resembles a large waiting room: people talk loudly there, but nobody catches the train.

Still, it would be a mistake to see only a futile gesture. What is at stake is a battle over common sense. Gramsci called hegemony that form of domination that rests as much on consent as on coercion: an order prevails when its assumptions become everyone's assumptions. The media are among those trenches where what he called a war of position is fought. That 600,000 people should sign to demand the disappearance of a channel is a sign that, on this terrain, the obvious is being contested.

Let us also look at how the subject will be covered, because the coverage is part of the story. We can already guess the cast: on one side the "reasonable" people, who will gravely remind everyone of free expression and pluralism; on the other, the petitioners, portrayed as a little too hasty. This vocabulary is never neutral. It places the defence of a concentrated media landscape on the side of wisdom, and the demand for a break on the side of excess.

The Marxist tradition reminds us that those who own the means of material production tend to own the means of mental production too. Ideology, here, does not mean lying: it refers to a partial picture of the world presented as universal. The useful question is therefore not only "what does this channel say?", but "who benefits from the framework within which we debate it?" It is striking that the discussion gravitates readily towards closure, and far less towards the ownership of the media or what a counter-hegemony would build: institutions, ideas, organic intellectuals coming from elsewhere than the studio sets.

The petition will at least have this virtue: forcing a debate that the dominant common sense would have preferred to hold in a whisper. The question now is whether the committee will examine it, and whether the Arcom, the only body holding the sanction, will judge that this uproar is its concern. For now, democracy has signed; it has not yet been heard.