News round-up, Thursday, January 19, 2023
Andres Gluski, President & CEO of the AES Corporation, had a productive first day at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting #WEF2023 in Davos, Switzerland.
—that the kind of worldwide transformation urgently needed now , can only be achieved with the cooperation of the public and private sectors, Gluski said.
Over the next few days, about 1,700 CEOs and 400 other prominent personalities will gather in Davos to explore solutions to global concerns such as climate change, energy efficiency, and electrification.
Image: Andrés Gluski, President and CEO and Ricardo Manuel Falú, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer and Madelka McCalla, Chief Corporate Affairs and Impact Officer at The AES Corporation
Reforestation day…
Since July 2015, Seaboard has been sponsoring a permanent brigade to contribute to the sustained work of recovering the forested area in the Upper Ozama River Basin.
Shocking: This is what Chile would be like if climate change continues, according to A.I. (La Tercera)
“For what purpose do we exist, and why are we required? Is artificial intelligence already more advanced than us?”
China Returns to Davos With Clear Message: We’re Open for Business
Emerging from coronavirus lockdown to a world changed by the war in Ukraine, China sought to convey reassurance about its economic health.
NYT by Mark Landler and Keith Bradsher
Jan. 17, 2023
DAVOS, Switzerland — China ventured back on to the global stage Tuesday, sending a delegation to the World Economic Forum to assure foreign investors that after three years in which the pandemic cut off their country from the world, life was back to normal.
But the Chinese faced a wary audience at the annual event, attesting to both the dramatically changed geopolitical landscape after Russia’s war on Ukraine, as well as two data points that highlighted a worrisome shift in China’s own fortunes.
Hours before a senior Chinese official, Liu He, spoke to this elite economic gathering in an Alpine ski resort, the government announced that China’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in 61 years. A short time earlier, it confirmed that economic growth had slowed to 3 percent, well below the trend of the past decade.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Liu sought to reassure his audience that China was still a good place to do business. “If we work hard enough, we are confident that growth will most likely return to its normal trend, and the Chinese economy will make a significant improvement in 2023,” he said.
Mr. Liu, a well-traveled vice premier who is one of China’s most recognizable faces in the West, insisted that the Covid crisis was “steadying,” seven weeks after the government abruptly abandoned its policy of quarantines and lockdowns. China had passed the peak of infections, he said, and had sufficient hospital beds, doctors and nurses, and medicine to treat the millions who are sick.
He did not mention the 60,000 fatalities linked to the coronavirus since the lockdowns were lifted, a huge spike in the official death toll that China announced three days ago.
Onstage at the World Economic Forum
The annual gathering of world leaders takes place in Davos, Switzerland, from Jan. 16 to 20.
China’s Message: China ventured back on to the global stage at the World Economic Forum, sending a delegation to assure foreign investors about its economic health after three years of pandemic isolation.
A New Buzzword: So many global troubles have arisen in recent months that the word “polycrisis” is everywhere in Davos — even in the organization’s annual report.
Going Nuclear: The filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has a history of jabbing the political, business and social elite with controversial projects, received a warm reception in Switzerland for a film promoting nuclear power.
Mr. Liu’s mild words and modest tone were in stark contrast to those of his boss, President Xi Jinping, who came to Davos in 2017 to claim the mantle of global economic leadership in a world shaken up by the election of Donald J. Trump in the United States and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.
Since then, the United States and Europe have united to support Ukraine against Russia, leaving the Russians isolated with the Chinese among their few friends. Russia’s revanchist campaign has raised questions among Europeans about whether China might have similar designs on Taiwan, and escalated security concerns among the world’s democracies.
Mr. Liu steered clear of political issues like the war in Ukraine or China’s tensions with the Biden administration. But he did say, “We have to abandon the Cold War mentality,” echoing a frequent Chinese criticism of the United States for attempting to contain China’s influence around the world.
But it is China’s demographics and economic growth that are raising the biggest questions among businesspeople. The decline in population lays bare the country’s falling birthrate, a trend that experts said was exacerbated by the pandemic and will threaten its growth over the long term. The 3 percent growth rate, the second weakest since 1976, reflects the stifling effect of the government’s Covid policy.
“The Chinese are worried, and they should be,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a professor of Asia studies at Georgetown University. “The entire international business community is way more negative about China over the long-term. A lot of people are asking, ‘Have we reached peak China?’”
Professor Medeiros, who served as a China adviser in the Obama administration, said, “For the past 20 years, China has benefited from both geoeconomic gravity and geopolitical momentum, but in the last year it has rapidly lost both.”
The signposts of China’s economic weakness are everywhere: the government announced on Friday that exports fell 9.9 percent in December relative to a year earlier.
“China has an export slowdown, construction is in crisis, and the local governments are running out of money,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University. “China needs the world: to boost its economy, to accompany the return to more normalcy.”
Mr. Liu laid out a familiar set of economic policies, from upholding the rule of law to pursuing “innovation-driven development.” He insisted that China was still attractive to foreign investors, who he said were integral to China’s plan to achieve the government’s goal of “common prosperity.”
“China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency,” Mr. Liu said. “We must open up wider and make it work better. We oppose unilateralism and protectionism.”
But China’s delegation was a reminder of how the government has sidelined some of its own best-known entrepreneurs as it has reined in powerful technology companies. Jack Ma, a co-founder of the Alibaba Group, used to be one of the biggest celebrities at the World Economic Forum, holding court in a chalet on the outskirts of Davos. Now shunted out of power, Mr. Ma is absent from Davos.
Instead, China sent less well-known executives from Ant Group, an affiliate of the Alibaba Group, as well as officials from China Energy Group and China Petrochemical Group. Unlike other countries, notably India and Saudi Arabia, which plastered buildings in Davos with advertisements for foreign investment, China has been low-key, holding meetings at the posh Belvedere Hotel.
After his speech, Mr. Liu, who has a command of English and holds a graduate degree from Harvard, met privately with business executives. Some expected him to be more candid in that session about the challenges China has faced.
Mr. Liu did not meet top American officials in Davos, though he will meet Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in Zurich on Wednesday. Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary who is at the conference, said he welcomed China’s return. “China’s in the world economy,” he said. “We need to engage with them.”
Though Mr. Liu, 70, has a significant international profile — having led trade negotiations with the Trump administration — China experts noted that he is not in Mr. Xi’s innermost circle. He is also no longer a member of the Chinese government’s ruling Politburo, though analysts said he retained the trust of Mr. Xi.
When he spoke at Davos in 2018, Mr. Liu’s speech was among the best attended of the conference. This year, however, about a quarter of the hall emptied before Mr. Liu spoke, after having been packed for a speech by Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.
The difference in crowd sizes reflected the reshuffled priorities of the West, now focused on exhibiting unity against Russian aggression.
Ms. von der Leyen, who celebrated that solidarity in her remarks, did not exactly warm up the audience for Mr. Liu. She accused the Chinese government, in its drive to dominate the clean-energy industries of the future, of unfairly subsidizing its companies at the expense of Europe and the United States.
“Climate change needs a global approach,” she said in a chiding tone, “but it needs to be a fair approach.”
Mark Landler reported from Davos, Switzerland and Keith Bradsher from Beijing.
Sweden pledges to send Archer artillery to Ukraine
Sweden's announcement comes a day before the US convenes a meeting of around 50 countries – including all 30 members of the NATO alliance – in Germany to discuss military aid to Ukraine.
Le Monde with AFP
Published on January 19, 2023
Sweden on Thursday, January 19, pledged to send its Archer artillery system, a modern mobile howitzer requested by Kyiv for months, to Ukraine along with armored vehicles and anti-tank missiles.
Speaking at a press conference, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said his government had agreed on a three-part military support package for Ukraine, including "the first decision on starting deliveries of the artillery system Archer to Ukraine."
Sweden, which has broken with its doctrine of not delivering weapons to a country at war, will also send 50 CV-90 armored vehicles and NLAW portable anti-tank missiles, the government said.
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"Military support is decisive," Kristersson said, as "it can change who retakes the initiative this winter" on the front in Ukraine.
The domestically developed Archer artillery system is composed of a fully-automated howitzer mounted on an all-terrain vehicle, which allows the gun to be remotely operated by the crew sitting in the armored cab.
Thursday's decision meant the Swedish Armed Forces would be given the task to "make the preparations to begin delivery of the artillery system Archer to Ukraine."
Defence Minister Pal Jonson said the government had also asked the armed forces to come back with a recommendation on how many of the Archers currently in storage could be sent.
Why progressives must push for a transformation of the media
The left goes on dancing to the media’s tune
The media insists politicians and campaigners become entertainers to connect with the public. The left has too willingly bought into a game it can’t win. A complete media strategy reset is long overdue.
by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert
Le Monde Diplomatique
Student activist Louis Boyard got noticed for his combative attitude and became a regular guest on the crowd-pleasing television show Touche pas à mon poste (‘Don’t touch my TV’, a play on Don’t Touch my Buddy, a French antiracist NGO created in 1994 to fight the National Front). His new fame helped him get selected as a candidate for the leftwing La France Insoumise (LFI, Unsubmissive France) and he won a seat in parliament. When Boyard returned as a guest on the show in November, the host, television personality Cyril Hanouna, called him ‘a piece of shit,’ a ‘loser’ and a ‘complete moron’ for daring to criticise Vincent Bolloré, the channel’s billionaire owner. It’s hard to imagine a more telling illustration of the balance of power between politics and the media.
The scandal boosted the show’s ratings and guests in subsequent weeks kept up the attacks on the ungrateful ‘kid’ who, they claimed, had ‘betrayed his friend’. ‘Frankly, [Boyard] showed a lack of respect,’ one guest even dared say. The show had been praised by several LFI leaders keen to reach its large audience of young, working-class viewers. ‘We go wherever we can take our message’, LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon explained after the incident. But at what cost?
The relationship that political organisations, campaign groups and trade unions have with the media, which has a monopoly on how public life is presented, contains an essential contradiction: rarely has the entanglement of the press and money been so pronounced, yet never has the radical left’s critique of the media seemed so opportunistic. Any organisation that challenges the established order knows that the press and power are linked. ‘Journalists must remember they aren’t mere observers, but part of the elite whose role is also to protect the country from chaos,’ warned two academic opponents of social movements (1). Nor are protesters unaware of the unpopularity of those who produce media content. Yet they accept, to varying degrees, the media’s demands, whether it’s to help fill the schedules of 24-hour news channels or appear as regulars on entertainment shows. But is it possible to use the mainstream media without merely dancing to their tune? What compromises are inevitable if you decide to work with the media?
Political theatre
Dealing with the media means first endorsing the idea that the big media companies are society’s distributors of speech: it’s journalists who popularise some movements, ignore others, and select spokespeople. For a fledging movement, the stakes are huge because it’s about breaking through the glass partition to join the public debate. However, the press prioritises organisations that can offer some sort of media performance: coming across as young, funny, punchy or divisive; planning actions where the shock value of the images compensates for the small number of participants — demonstrating naked, dressing up, flinging soup on a painting. The slogans that are part of this political theatre sound more like advertising jingles or newspaper headlines — tongue-in-cheek, offbeat, witty — than slogans that express demands, which bore journalists.
This kind of action sometimes pays off: ACT UP, the association which campaigned to end the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, achieved notable results. More recently, environmental activists’ stunts have highlighted the fight against global warming. But not all protests can be turned into stunts. Quirkier forms of action are generally the work of the educated urban middle class. In 2004 the Parisian press instinctively supported striking academics; Le Monde put them on its front page six times (3-11 March). Two months later, when striking energy sector workers at EDF caused power cuts, a front-page cartoon in the same paper compared them to American torturers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (9 June 2004). In both strikes, however, the aim was to protect a public service.
Students planned symbolic events to attract the media spotlight ... The media helped recruit new members and backers who expected to find there what they saw on television or read in the papers ... They smoked dope, read less, and went for brokeTodd Gitlin
To get media attention, therefore, ordinary employees in ordinary companies have done extraordinary things, such as threaten to blow up their factory, as Cellatex workers did in the Ardennes in 2000 and staff at GMS in the Creuse in 2017; hold company directors hostage; or ransack local government offices. Or storm the Champs-Élysées, as the Gilets Jaunes did in 2018. But the risks differ: academics who protested by lying down on the pavement in white coats just risked catching a cold, while nearly 2,300 Gilets Jaunes were convicted and 400 imprisoned; some suffered life-changing injuries.
The selective nature of media attention can alter a movement’s behaviour: actions with an immediate media payoff are more likely to go ahead, sometimes regardless of whether the presence of cameras helps to achieve long-term political goals. It’s easier to pull off a mention on the TV news than it is to get employers or the government to capitulate. When appearing in the papers becomes an end in itself, an organisation’s strategy is reduced to a series of stunts designed to attract journalists. A French activist’s handbook, Guerilla Kit (La Découverte, 2008), explained that journalists ‘are busy people. You have to make their work easier. The more boxes you can tick in the following list, the likelier your action is to get into the media.’ The list included novelty, drama, conflict, disruption, celebrities, surprise, scandal and controversy.
Not only does media strategy change a movement’s direction, it can also change its composition. Recalling his experience in 1960s America with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), sociologist Todd Gitlin observed that the organisation ‘began to organise symbolic events deliberately to attract the media spotlight ... The media helped recruit into SDS new members and backers who expected to find there what they saw on television or read in the papers ... They smoked dope, they had read less, they went for broke’ (2). Sixty years later, an ‘exclusive investigation’ into the campaign against a new airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (M6, 29 March 2015) echoed Gitlin’s thoughts. Entitled ‘Environmentalists, extremists or marginals: who are these nimbies who defy the state?’, the report sought out eccentric contributors, including a man who boasted he drank petrol and another who wielded a hatchet...
Obsessed with novelty
The way a journalistic world obsessed with novelty works poses a challenge for those who engage in the media competition: how to keep up the pace long-term? From feminist movements in the 1970s to environmental activists who stage actions in museums, each new campaign, with its own methods and tools, can quickly attract the media spotlight, but become passé just as quickly. In 2011 the celebration of Twitter and Facebook activism sometimes gave the impression that Arab revolts were happening online rather than on the streets; 12 years later, activist use of social media is part of the standard playbook. Dozens of collectives that organised spectacular actions to promote progressive causes have been adored, then neglected, and finally buried by the media.
‘When an editor rings,’ said a representative of the now unfashionable association Agir Ensemble Contre le Chômage (AC!, an organisation which campaigns on behalf of the unemployed), ‘it’s not to ask our opinion on something fundamental, but to find “typical” unemployed people: “We’re looking for someone out of work between such and such an age.” It’s social casting. They aren’t interested in what we do.’ Maurad Rabhi, who was a CGT delegate during the Cellatex dispute in 2000, formed the same view: ‘During the conflict, you’re in the limelight, you represent a cause. And then it’s all gone. When the spotlight’s turned off, you’re back in the shadows, on your own’ (3).
Every time there's a major strike, the reporting's the same. With refuse collectors, it's rubbish piling up in the streets. With postal workers, it's the absence of mail. With railway workers, it's the lack of trains. This shows that these are really useful jobs. That should make it possible for us to discuss the need to pay them properlyPhilippe Poutou.
The inherent risk in competing for media attention is all too obvious: if an organisation’s visibility depends above all on the airtime it gets from the mainstream media, they also have the power to make it invisible. After Olivier Besancenot, then spokesperson for the LCR (the forerunner of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA)), appeared on Philippe Bouvard’s Grosses Têtes comedy show, the organisation’s founder, Alain Krivine, said, ‘Even if Olivier doesn’t like doing it, it’s best not to turn down these programmes, otherwise we’ll disappear.’ Go on a comedy show or disappear: it’s hardly an appealing choice. ‘We’ve gone out of fashion,’ Subcomandante Marcos admitted in 2007, looking back on 13 years of insurrection in Chiapas (Mexico). ‘If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing, except perhaps be less present on the media scene’ (4).
Because getting the media’s attention isn’t enough. Maintaining their goodwill means not crossing the ‘yellow lines’ that journalists set in advance. According to journalists, overstepping them (by, for example, picketing, interrupting exams, cancelling festivals, blocking motorways or occupying buildings) means sacrificing public support. And then journalists will turn on protesters and call them extremists, hostage-takers, populists and wreckers of the economy. Thereafter, the media will focus on a perennial question: ‘Do you condemn violent protests?’
Challenging the law
But almost no social movement would have succeeded, even in a democracy, without at some point challenging the legitimacy of the law — not the trade union struggle, or the US civil rights movement, or the fight to legalise abortion, or the LGBT associations’ fight for equal rights. This fact leaves powerful journalists indifferent; their knowledge of history is often minimal. The social order is a given. The media is not designed to offer dissenters a platform to explain why they want to change the world: its aim is to produce journalist-arbitrated ‘debate’, soundbites to feed the 24-hour news channels or, better still, Twitterstorms.
Since the early 1960s, many movements — often outside France — have been interested in the question of their relationship with the media, without the knowledge of what’s been learnt necessarily being passed on. Speaking of the civil rights struggle in the US, a close friend of Martin Luther King, J Hunter O’Dell, explained, ‘It was disastrous for us to rely primarily upon these corporate forms of mass communication to get our message and analysis out to the public. In the end, it means a new kind of addiction to media rather than being in charge of our own agenda and relying on mass support as our guarantee that ultimately the news-covering apparatus must give recognition to our authority’ (5). Forgetting this conclusion, intentionally or not, gives a few personalities the chance to experience first the thrill of media fame, and then its backlash.
Just as they select protest movements, journalists choose the spokespeople who best fit their preconceptions and most willingly comply with their demands. Participants, obliged to fit the mould, have learned to work with journalists’ ‘constraints’. Former LFI spokesperson Raquel Garrido described her experience: ‘When you get a call at 6pm to come in at 10pm, 11pm or midnight, of course you have to say yes. And when a journalist calls you at midnight to record an interview that will be broadcast on the radio from 5am, you have to drop everything and make yourself available.’
Being ready to drop everything means responding before there has been collective deliberation about what position to take or the conditions for participating in a programme. The media’s schedule differs from that of a democratic organisation: when a journalist calls a trade union spokesperson for a reaction to a news story, the union has rarely had time to meet and agree its stance. However, if the union representative refuses to oblige, to avoid the fallout from an improvised response, he or she knows the journalist will contact a rival union or someone more willing to speak off the cuff. As most members of collectives now have a Twitter account where they mix self-promotion with (more or less informed) commentary on the news, centrifugal forces can destabilise an organisation.
While protest organisations mobilise collective action to win their battles, political journalism personalises collective struggles to tell their stories. Interviewees are asked to divulge aspects of their family life, their tastes and personal experience more often than they are interviewed about their objectives, or the struggles and thinking of the movements they represent.
In 2001 the Confédération Paysanne (agricultural union) spokesman, José Bové, agreed to appear on Michel Drucker’s programme Vivement Dimanche (Roll on Sunday). Following his example, many radical leftwing figures have revealed themselves in magazines or on talk shows, sometimes even donning costumes, which has annoyed many activists. Twenty years ago, an activist asked Besancenot, ‘What are you going to do on stupid TV shows?’ A party representative responded, ‘We must always bear in mind the wide angle, a broad audience ... We mustn’t be afraid of the general public and we mustn’t have a contemptuous attitude towards a whole slew of popular programmes’ (6).
Such a stance assumes that the depoliticisation of the working class has reached a point where politicians need to appear on entertainment shows to establish a rapport with the social groups they hope to appeal to. Accepting this, however, means ignoring the fact that the way these programmes work is based on depoliticising issues and recasting them as interpersonal battles. The media was quick to reframe anti-capitalist LFI MP Louis Boyard’s criticism of billionaire Vincent Bolloré (mentioned earlier) as the ‘Boyard-Hanouna clash’.
‘What people are, not what they do’
This focus on the individual marginalises common causes. Luc Le Vaillant, the journalist responsible for Libération’s ‘Portraits’ section for over 20 years, acknowledges they ‘focus on what people are, not what they do’ (Libération, 13 November 2015). The profile format prioritises individual psychology over collective interests; social forces take a back seat to individual characteristics. The image of a lone man standing up to a column of tanks has become the symbol of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, to the point of airbrushing out the large crowd that took part. Through the press’s lens, a mass movement is transformed into acts of personal bravery.
‘I’m the first to deplore the superficiality this imposes on the message,’ Garrido, the former LFI spokesperson, concedes in her Manuel de Guérilla médiatique (Guerrilla Media Manual, Michel Laffont, 2018). ‘But I’m not the one who makes the rules, and my only options were to opt out or comply.’ Some people do opt out. Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US had major successes between 2015 and 2020 without following the rules; their subsequent failure had other causes. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has alternated the ‘wide angle, broad audience’ strategy with temporary boycotts of media outlets he considers hostile (France Inter, Libération, Mediapart). At the same time, these three leaders encouraged the independent media, in the hope that they would allow them a degree of autonomy compared with the mainstream press.
But the creation and growth of a market in personalities self-fuelled by social networks and clips of confrontations have not made things easier. To promote their own brand within their organisation and differentiate themselves from competitors, many politicians willingly react to the controversies of the moment as chosen by the media. This decision takes its toll on organisations’ cohesion and their democratic life, especially when access to friendly journalists becomes a weapon for settling internal scores — and risks the media having greater influence on the debates within a party than its own activists.
How can you claim to break the system when you yourself contribute to perpetuating it? This question was posed by the rise of Podemos in Spain. In 2011 the Indignados movement rejected the idea of having a media spokesperson. But three years later, the Podemos party was created from the grassroots movement and a leader emerged: the young, brilliant, telegenic Pablo Iglesias, who hosted an online debate show. ‘We chose Iglesias,’ said the party’s head of international affairs, ‘because he was a guy who spoke very well on TV, who was beginning to create social identification around him’ (7).
Podemos soon saw the limits of this strategy. Iglesias himself admitted, ‘The first months of Podemos were strongly marked by the role I played in the media. Its dependence on me always being in the media was so great that the campaign team took the decision to put my face on ballot papers ... We [now] want the collective to play a leading role, which we think is more reasonable and, above all, more interesting’ (8). But it was already too late: the media, which had loved Iglesias, turned around and cast the strategic conflict between him and another leader, Inigo Ejerón, as a power struggle.
Criteria for media excellence
The media operates in a way that gives journalists excessive power to ‘elect’ a movement’s representatives, who are themselves pre-selected from the pool of those willing to play the media game. The criteria for media excellence differ radically from political excellence. In the former case, what matters is appearing at ease on air, and coming up with striking soundbites that will be picked up by the press and social media. In contrast, activists’ authority is based on experience, expertise, camaraderie, being ready to put yourself on the line etc. While the media rewards the telegenic with fame, platforms and travel — and amplifies their message — it completely overlooks those who keep movements alive through ‘ordinary’ struggles.
Analysing the American protest movement of the 1960s, the sociologist Todd Gitlin made an enlightening comparison between the alienation of workers from what they produce and that of activists from the (media) representation of their political action: ‘Just as people as workers have no voice in what they make, how they make it, or how the product is distributed and used, so do people as producers of meaning have no say in what the media make what they say or do, or in the context within which the media frame their activity. The resulting meanings, now mediated, acquire an eery substance in the real world, standing outside their ostensible makers and confronting them as an alien force’ (9).
Although avoided by the leaders of most political organisations, associations and trade unions, the question of relationships with the media has become increasingly acute within social movements. During the French strikes of spring-summer 2003, teachers and entertainment industry workers initially agreed to play the journalistic game of vox pops, profiles and other staged events. Then, seeing that their goodwill only led to feeding the preconceived image that the media had created for their movement, they targeted media premises, sometimes occupying them and interrupting broadcasts.
In 2018 the Gilets Jaunes did likewise, as the students opposed to the ‘contrat première embauche’ (first employment contract, with reduced rights) had done in 2006. In several universities, organisers had drafted charters regulating relations with the press. And several union general assemblies voted to ban journalists from debates on the grounds that their presence altered participants’ behaviour. Nearly a century earlier, the secretary general of the CGT union, Léon Jouhaux, wondered in La Bataille syndicaliste (The Union Battle) ‘whether we should continue to welcome into our midst people who systematically, with their bias, denigrate our action and disfigure our discussions, or whether we should not instead ruthlessly refuse them entry to our meetings’ (10). Such readiness to challenge the media has remained the exception.
Yet contemporary history provides important examples of political mobilisations that achieved their goal without the mainstream media’s help, and even in spite of it, not least the French referendum against the European Constitution Treaty in 2005. Patient, obstinate activist work won out over journalistic theatrics. Throughout the campaign, hostility to the press even strengthened the mobilisation.
‘The free communication of ideas’
The media has an obligation to ensure ‘the free communication of ideas and opinion’. This guarantee, enshrined in France’s constitution, is not a favour that anyone should beg for by accepting airtime in the dead of night, unreasonable demands and demeaning formats. Nor, above all, on condition that they keep quiet about the media’s ideological role, the monopoly of a handful of oligarchs, and the declining quality of the information they provide.
When political leaders stop fearing the power of the media, we see scenes that are both gratifying and instructive. Asked by BFMTV to react to the endless vox pops on strikers as ‘hostage takers’, Philippe Poutou said last October, ‘Every time there’s a major strike, the reporting’s the same. When it’s refuse collectors, it’s rubbish piling up in the streets. When it’s postal workers, it’s the absence of mail. When it’s railway workers, it’s the lack of trains. This shows that these are really useful jobs. That should make it possible to discuss the need to pay them properly ... If there was a strike by the shareholders of the CAC40 [French stock market], not many people would be bothered. And if BFM commentators went on strike for a fortnight, not many people would be bothered either.’
Gilets Jaunes, unions, parties and associations all have the power to turn things around, to remind the media of its obligations and, if necessary, force it to respect them. They can consider the conditions of their media coverage: which programmes to go on, how much speaking time to demand without being interrupted, which subjects to discuss, which other guests to appear with. This would be an apt counterpart to the endless list of demands the Élysée makes of the broadcasters who give the president a platform on television. Forcing the press to fulfil its mission means radically transforming it rather than cajoling it.
Over 40 years ago, the sociologist and historian Christopher Lasch advised against ‘abstract theorising about the mass media’ and grounding discussion ‘in the concrete historical experience of those who have tried to use mass media for critical, subversive, and revolutionary purposes’, which has largely proved to be ‘self-defeating. Political activists who seek to change society would do better to stick to the patient work of political organising instead of trying to organise a movement “with mirrors” ’ (11). His conclusion is as relevant as ever.
Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert
Serge Halimi is president and editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique; Pierre Rimbert is a member of its board of directors.