TV and influencers: the alliance of the old world and its young recruits

According to Le Figaro, which devotes an investigation to the subject published on 1 November, TV channels and influencers, long "at daggers drawn", are now multiplying collaborations to reinvent the codes of broadcasting. The paper's headline echoes a sentence that sums up the affair: "We can reach a younger audience." The briefing we have does not detail which channels, which names or what sums are involved. We will not invent them. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established finding.

First, the vocabulary. The two worlds "have understood their interest": the reconciliation is presented as a matter of two sensible adults finally ceasing to sulk. Nobody is cast as the villain, nobody loses. It is the usual grammar of economic common sense: what is profitable becomes what is sensible, and what is sensible becomes what is natural.

Let us take the phenomenon from the other end. For years, online influence was, in part, a space where voices from outside newsrooms and the profession's training schools made themselves heard, with their own way of speaking, their own subjects, their irreverence. These creators sometimes resembled what Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, would have called organic intellectuals: people drawn from an audience, who articulate its experiences without asking tradition's permission. Yet a channel that invites them does not merely receive an audience. It acquires credibility, that of "those who speak true", which it could no longer manufacture itself.

This is where the notion of hegemony is useful, in the sense Gramsci gave it: a power exercised as much through consent as through coercion. It is not a matter of banning dissent, but of offering it a platform, a set of specifications and a contract. Youth culture, with its codes and its distrust, is thus absorbed into a framework whose rules are still set elsewhere: schedules, advertisers, shareholders, formats. Contestation becomes a genre, almost a time slot.

It would be just as convenient to slip into nostalgia and lament the defilement of independence. Let us recall that the platforms where these creators flourished belong to large private groups, whose algorithms decide their visibility. Independence was already conditional. Television does not absorb a free space: it brings together two owners of cultural production capacity, one of whom needs youth and the other institutional legitimacy.

The dominant ideas, the Marxist tradition reminds us, are those of the people who control the means of mental production. The question to put to this alliance is therefore not "does it work?" but "who benefits from the common sense that comes out of it?" Who decides the subjects, the limits, what remains sayable in a co-produced programme? And what becomes of those who will never sign a contract?

The Figaro investigation, in what we know of it, does not answer these questions. Its merit is to make them visible, even without meaning to.