Can you hear this tiny media buzz?

If the media coverage of the economic recovery in some European countries is noticeable, this is because it is an extensive media coverage. The newspapers of the 27 member states of the European Union have dedicated papers to the issue, most of them being rather fact-oriented the day following the publication of the statistics. Afterwards, more critical analyses appeared in the press of these countries – with different newspapers going back over the statements of a single economist (“The Risk of a double-dip recession is rising” and “Une reprise fantôme” by Nouriel Roubini, respectively in the Financial Times 24.08.09 and Les Echos 18.08.09), a repeat rather unnoticed by non-experts in the information and the communication business insofar as very few people actually read several newspapers a day (or watch the news on different TV channels a same day).

It is worth being able to decode the news we read in the press or on the internet, or we hear through the television or the radio, and to which we are exposed on a daily basis, sometimes without considering it a big deal, because these pieces of information are actually what some people call the media buzz, a buzz measured by experts in media monitoring and in the communication business – which is much less visible than its older sister, the audimat index rating TV audiences.What experts are measuring are the so-called media buzz units, determining the exposure and the tone of a media issue, a celebrity or a company, all this depending on the visibility of the issue – expressed in numbers of pages or minutes dedicated to the issue – and depending on the audience of the media supports – expressed in numbers of readers, listeners, TV-viewers or internet users. The media position of the issue – whether or not it is making the headlines – is relevant as well.

Unifying and leveling down

Information is no longer only meant to enlighten readers, listeners, TV-viewers and web users, it is also useful to the experts in the communication business who, under the pretext of making the news easily accessible, are perverting the freedom of speech, a concept particularly important to the journalists – with the political and economic dimensions of communication actually shaking the foundations of the freedom of speech. As a media, internet is an area of freedom increasingly monitored and analysed, which is even becoming a subject of investigation for the people measuring the units of media buzz.

What is more, the journalists themselves are using press digests not to determine how to differentiate their editions from others – and if they do, it is only in an infinitesimal way – , but to determine how to cover an event depending on what has already been said in other medias, thereby leveling down this amazing concept which is the freedom of speech, a freedom having to face the risk of being perverted by analyses offices as well as ministerial and company communication departments – and unfortunately frequently failing to slip through this net Being manipulated and rather aware of it, the journalists are good at manipulating citizens, dedicating large parts of their medias to short news items of a relative importance nevertheless crucial to hide more relevant pieces of information. When short news items are creating a diversion, they are forming social groups that would not exist without media coverage and they are therefore accelerating the pace of fake thoughts made of prejudices (as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it in a 1996 interview on television, true thoughts are the ones taking their time to dismantle prejudices).