Ban CNews: 800,000 signatures and a fight over common sense

According to Libération, the petition calling for CNews to be removed, hosted on the website of the Assemblée nationale (France's lower house of parliament), has passed 800,000 signatures. It went viral after the racist attack in the Yvelines. Its author, Lucas Massoni, told "CheckNews", the fact-checking desk of the paper, why he started it. What we know stops there: the dispatch says nothing about his detailed motivations, nor about what the Assemblée might do with the text. As for the attack, we stick to what the paper reports, and do not turn it into a courtroom argument: people suffered, and their grief is not an argument.

Everything that follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First observation, from experience: look at who, in the debate to come, will be cast as the grown-up in the room. The division of roles is already easy to predict. On one side, the petitioners, presented as emotional, "knee-jerk", driven by the news cycle. On the other, the guardians of pluralism, solemn and concerned for free expression. This allocation of roles is anything but neutral. It assumes that an opinion channel is just one point of view among others, and that calling for its closure is a lapse, not a political position open to debate.

This is where the notion of hegemony becomes useful. For Gramsci, a ruling class governs as much by consent as by coercion: it succeeds when its worldview becomes common sense, the thing that goes without saying. The media are the trenches of this war of position. When a channel installs its framings, obsessions and vocabulary day after day until they seem banal, that is precisely what the concept describes. The petition is, in its own way, a counter-fire: 800,000 people are saying that what passes for good sense is not good sense to them.

Second observation, less comfortable for the enthusiasts. A signature is not an institution. The concept of counter-hegemony, as our notes summarise it, demands building institutions, ideas and organic intellectuals rooted in the world of work, not merely calling for the disappearance of the opponent. Shutting down a channel manufactures no alternative common sense, and the power that carried out the shutdown would not necessarily be the one we hope for. You do not win a war of position with a "delete" button.

Third point: who owns the means of cultural production? A channel is also an asset, held by an owner and financed by interests. To remind ourselves that dominant ideas are often those of whoever controls these means is to raise the underlying question: why does the plurality of news depend on private fortunes? The answer will not be settled on a television set, nor on a parliamentary website.

Finally, the value of the gesture lies in forcing us to say out loud who decides what counts as reasonable. Whether or not the Assemblée responds, the question has been asked.