Zemmour and CNews: the Arcom wakes up, common sense was already asleep

According to Mediapart, the Arcom (France's broadcast regulator) has finally referred Éric Zemmour, Reconquête candidate and CNews commentator, to the courts over fresh remarks deemed problematic since 17 October. The site also reports that a few months ago the regulator had decided not to sanction the channel for racist and conspiracist remarks by the same Zemmour, against the advice of the independent rapporteur attached to the Conseil d'État (France's top administrative court). What exactly those remarks contained, and the precise nature of the referral, the wire report does not say: we know no more than that at this stage.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. It starts from a simple observation: the chronology matters as much as the decision. For years, an authority meant to arbitrate treated as tolerable what its own rapporteur judged sanctionable. In the regulator's vocabulary, this is called "prudence", "proportionality", "freedom of expression". Words of reasonable people. The question remains who, in this story, is presented as the grown-up in the room.

This is where the notion of hegemony is useful, explained without jargon: a social order holds less through coercion than through consent, when its ideas become everyone's "common sense". The media are the trenches of this war of position. A channel that installs, evening after evening, a narrative about immigration and identity does not merely comment: it shifts what seems sayable, then what seems normal. And the regulator, by letting it pass, is no outside spectator; it helps fix the line between "excess" and "debate".

There is also the question of ownership. The dominant ideas, as the Marxist tradition reminds us, are often those of the people who own the means of mental production: channels, newspapers, opinion pages. What presents itself as neutral, here balance and restraint, is a partial picture of the world offered as universal. One can ask whose interests it serves, without ascribing intentions to anyone: a regulator can reproduce common sense without wanting to, simply out of habit about what seems reasonable to it.

The current awakening deserves its own reading, moreover. What does it take for an authority to move? Not the accumulation of remarks, apparently, but a political moment: a candidacy, a news sequence, a pressure. If the timing mattered, it would be less a conversion than an adjustment, common sense shifting just enough for yesterday's unacceptable to become today's file. Conversely, the referral may well reflect a genuine legal conviction; the report does not allow us to decide.

One thing is verifiable in any case: the independent rapporteur's opinion existed, and it was set aside. The question is therefore not only what the courts will say, but why it took so many years for the institution to hear one of its own voices. Hegemonies love arbiters who arrive after the final whistle.