5. Audiences and Readership of Revolutionary Leftist Media: The “Media Leader” Hypothesis

This chapter expands on the material presented in the second chapter of Médias: le peuple n’est pas condamné à TF1 ! (Goulet 2015).

Audiences are constructed by production, they are not merely the result of adjusting a product to an already existing demand: “the media simultaneously create their programmes and audiences” by integrating audiences in production as a preliminary step (Méadel 1986, p. 8).

Christian Geffray (1954–2001) was an academic Dean at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). He produced a dense, compact body of work, and his aim was to import the contributions of psychoanalysis into sociology.

For a short presentation on the history of progressive media and the debates within them about their operation and strategic orientation, see Cardon and Granjon (2013).

“Any discourse depends, for the construction of its social relevance, on the specific conditions of the exchange in which it emerges” (Charaudeau 1997, p. 67).

“Analysis of the reader’s literary experience will avoid any damaging psychologising, if to describe the reception of a work and the effect it produces, it reconstructs the horizon of expectation of its first audience, that is, the objectively conceivable system of references, which at the time each work appeared, stemmed from three main factors: the audience’s prior experience of the genre to which it belongs, the forms and themes of previous works with which the audience is assumed to be familiar, and the opposition between the poetic and practical functions of language, between an imaginary world and daily reality” (Jauss 1978, p. 54).

Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (1895), in Freud 1921, p. 146.

It may be useful to recall a few psychoanalytical concepts here: the Ego Ideal (Ich-Ideal) is on the same level as the Superego (Über-Ich), but is separate from it. While the Superego is a critical, inhibiting authority, which judges and condemns, the Ego Ideal is a much more positive and constructive part of the mind, which presents an identification model and suggests that satisfaction may be attained by conforming to representations viewed as positive. “A component of personality stemming from the convergence of narcissism (the idealisation of self) with identifications with one’s parents, parental substitutes and collective ideals. As a separate part of the mind, the Ego Ideal is a model to which the subject seeks to conform” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, p. 184). It is the part of the mind thanks to which an individual becomes a subject, and it is built out of identifications (and particularly for Sigmund Freud, identification with the father) and it permanently chains the individual to the ideals and requirements of social life. By separating the Ego Ideal from the Ego, a subject allows himself/herself to feel satisfied with his/her Ego (thereby keeping the Superego at bay) but also to become part of the social “game”.

“Effective revolutionary leadership requires open communication channels between leaders and followers” (Gurr 1970, p. 223).

Comments made in 1793 by Desgenettes, a former school friend, transcribed by Duval and quoted by A. Agostini 1999, p. 16.

See Birnbaum 1979, and, about its use in media, see Goulet 2010, pp. 173–205 (chapter “vivre la domination”).

Red-coloured poster plastered on 7 January 1871 on the walls of Paris, then under siege by the German troops, denouncing the Government of National Defence, which was about to capitulate, and calling for the inauguration of the Commune.

This quote and the following quotes are from an interview the author made of Marcel Trillat in November 2012.

Only the far-right Front National was not allowed on air, because as M. Trillat explained, “racism is not an opinion”.

“We will look the 1% of people who have grabbed the assets of the other 99% in the eyes. We will help the people see clearly who is at the bottom and who is at the top. We will talk about the exhaustion of a model that eliminates the weakest people, destroys the natural environment, condemns future generations, and crushes the unsuccessful in its fiendish mill without hardly thinking about it” (Domínguez and Giménez 2015, p. 15).

Current research on didactics agrees on the importance of feedback to “get learners to give up their initial representations for more definite knowledge” (Weisser 2009, p. 103).

The phrase was coined by A.-M. Thiesse (1984, p. 46), who believed that “popular reading assumes and applies conventional realism and a distancing from the real world”.

See http://​blogs.​mediapart.​fr/​blog/​vincent-goulet/​160115/​charlie-hebdo-un-media-meneur-titre-posthume, available on 20/02/17.