New Watchdogs

the New Watchdogs is a book of Serge Halimi, concerning the Média S, published in 1997 and brought up to date in 2005, which was a strong best-seller (more than 200.000 specimens the first year).

Presentation

Serge Halimi presents to it, in four short chapters, his analysis of what he regards as a collusion between media capacity and policies, using a study which wants to be exhaustive on television and the large French newspapers.

He also claims to dismount the sometimes partial and obliging treatment certain French media with respect to the companies which are the Actionnaire S.

He explains also the little of case which is according to him makes social movements, and the dominating place of the various facts in the tv news. He takes again the thesis according to which “the fact various makes diversion”, according to the formula of Pierre Bourdieu, which prefaced this book. In its final chapter, it underlines complicities in the journalistic medium, facilitating self-promotions.

The title makes to reference to the work the Watchdogs (1932), in which Paul Nizan denounced the analyzes of the most famous philosophers of its time: those, for Nizan, guaranteed the perpetuation of the middle-class ideology, by describing the man in his ideal and immutable identity rather than in its particular and material existence. The book of Serge Halimi starts with an epigraph extracted the work of Nizan: “We will not accept eternally who the respect granted to the mask of the philosophers is finally advantageous only with the capacity of the bankers. ” It is closed by:

“Speaking about the journalists of its country, an American trade unionist observed: " Twenty years ago, they lunched with us in coffees. Today, they dine with industriels." By meeting only " décideurs" , while being canted in a company of court and money, while being transformed into machine with propaganda of the thought of market, journalism was locked up in a class and a caste. It lost readers and his credit. It precipitated the impoverishment of the public debate. This situation is the characteristic of a system: the codes of conduct will not change large-thing there. But, vis-a-vis so that Paul Nizan called " the flexible concepts which the careful cash clerks of the thought bourgeoise" arrange; , clearness is a form of resistance. ”

the New Watchdogs was republished in November 2005, in a brought up to date and increased edition.

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