FIGAROVOX.- The government announced, by a tweet from its spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye, the establishment of a review of press articles deemed reliable . Is this “fact-checking” really his responsibility?
Arnaud BENEDETTI.- This government initiative expresses the great excitement of an executive power which, for lack of power to censor, turns into a certifier of information. It goes without saying that it is not up to the State to do this work. The biggest lies in history have often been spread by states. Since the start of the mandate, Emmanuel Macron has been the archangel of the fight against fake-news. He randomly and questionably legislated on this subject. The Prime Minister himself when presenting his deconfinement strategy attacked social networks and other commentators.
When the state claims to tell us the truth, it is only telling "its" truth.What is actually happening? A battle around government communications which, since the start of this crisis, has been taken up on numerous occasions for lack of truth. Everything happens as if, far from accepting its error and recognizing it, the only way to loosen doubt as to the official word, the power bunkerized its com ', rushed into a headlong rush, locked itself in an escalation of denial. In a liberal democracy, the truth is first and foremost the matter of the public space where argument and counter argument are formed and where the media, among and with others, debate the latter in a necessarily pluralistic framework. When the state claims to tell us the truth, it is only telling "its" truth ... or its lies. In other words, this device is nothing more than an awkward attempt to return to a form of ministry of information, even of an "office of the public spirit" such as the revolutionaries created it in 1792 ...
Fueling the idea that certain media or journalists are more reliable than others, is this an attack on press freedom, the “fourth power” of democratic countries?
"At low noise" as Pierre Manent reminded you in your columns a few days ago, under the guise of sanitary struggle, we are still roughing up the spirit of liberal democracy. The state must first protect freedom of expression, of which the press is one of the conditions. Here, not only is he embarking on a path not devoid of partiality, but he claims to be a substitute for citizen free will to tell us how we should read the press. First of all, it is to forget that independent journalists are the best able to carry out this verification work, it is then to omit that in a pluralist regime he does not have to be the arbiter of press titles between them, it is finally denying the imprescriptible autonomy of society, one of the main achievements of democratic regimes.
We are living a sequence of infantilization by com '.With this device, the executive does not inform about its action, it "de-neutralizes", trivializes itself to the point of being a lambda actor, a com 'agency in a way, which enters an arena where it is not legitimate. The press has taken decades to forge its autonomy from power and when the state intends to interfere in the citizen's relationship with the media, it once again takes on a mission that is not its own. It only shows that it intends to go ever further in what is called “governance of conduct”. We know how to wash our hands, we know that we must not move without authorization, we will know what we must read, believe or not believe ... We live a rare sequence of infantilization by com ' .
Can the government itself completely exonerate itself from the responsibility of having disseminated some information, if not false, at least erroneous?
This is where the shoe pinches precisely. The reality is that since the start of this crisis the maturity of society has perhaps been inversely proportional to the immaturity of the state. What are we entitled to demand from a public communication? Transparency first! No need to trace the genealogy of this crisis to understand that the "chiaroscuro" was the communicating engine of the executive. This means that the issuer who claims to “fact-checking” is suspect, already because the State does not have to usurp this task, but that in addition to the very fresh memory of the crisis it is not credible.
That it is the spokesperson of the government, whose credibility is widely consumed, who takes over from this device opens the way to all criticism. To fight against the post-truth, it is better to avoid being the product yourself. It remains to understand the deep springs of this announcement. There comes a time when organizations can no longer back down. This is called escalation of engagement, where a structure can no longer stop the mechanics of denial that it has set in motion. Its survival is then indexed to the perpetuation of this denial. This is no longer the legal-rational state but a pathological form of state. The federal administration in the USA knew in 1965 that it had lost the war in Vietnam, but preferred to lie to its opinion. It is somewhat the same with the shortage of masks which has not finished fragmenting the reputation of the executive and demonetizing its word.
We want less from a man who recognizes his mistakes than from one who persists in pretense.Finally, what can we say about the impact of this "coup de com '" at the heart of a crisis which reveals, more gaping than ever, the fractures of French distrust of those who govern it?
The "café du commerce", whatever the Prime Minister likes, is less sensitive to propaganda than the elites. Jacques Ellul pointed out that the "propagandized" is often more educated than the average, more socially seated too because he finds in some form of intellectual propaganda answers to his existential anxieties and to his will to understand a world which escapes him. Today public opinion is undoubtedly more exposed than in the past to massive and continuous disinformation processes, but if they adhere to it, it is also because the public authorities have not hesitated many times to say and to dedicate oneself, to "fictionalize" reality, to truncate it.
There has been something flawed in the language of the executive for weeks, bad communicating skin that should have been gotten rid of by means other than denial and sometimes sufficiency. Aristotle says somewhere that we want less from a man who recognizes his mistakes than from one who persists in pretense ... At the time of the digital maelstrom, of the infosphere as large as it is trapping, the instrumentalizing com has become an almost hopeless exercise. The government's “detox” in these circumstances only reinforces the suspicion of concealment that has weighed on his expression for weeks.