Abstract :
[en] If researchers commonly agree that media transparency is a lure as every media message contains an underlying point of view, values and ideologies, yet it seems to be presented as a desirable goal by some devices that wish to engage the user in their communicative promise. Among these, websites concerned by news processing in a media educational approach have to prove their authority and the authenticity of their analyses by highlighting their procedures (in investigative journalism, fact checking, etc.). The line of demarcation between transparency and opacity is then superimposed on the one that distinguishes between truth and falsehood and, to a certain extend, to that other dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. Transparency thus appears to be a guarantee of authenticity, allowing collaboration between the media and the user, and committing the latter to validate the communicative proposal made by the media device. In addition, transparency in this context responds to a challenge enabling information production professionals to legitimise themselves through the exhibition of good practices intended to be used as criteria for assessing the reliability of news and to equip users in their understanding of informational texts (Doutreix et Barbe 2019; Schürgers 2021).
In this contribution, I will examine how the scenography of three media devices relies on polyphony, which could be defined very briefly as an articulation of the voices coming from different stakeholders in media discourses (journalists, experts, public, etc.), to give substance to the communicational promises of transparency and objectivity supposed to guarantee quality information. My hypothesis is that polyphony can be used in such cases to create a representation of truth and transparency/objectivity.
I will first briefly recall the framework governing the relationship between transparency and the media, and how the notion of transparency has become a prescription in public communication (Catellani and al. 2015; Alloa and Thomä 2019; Allard-Huver 2017; Bordarie, Damiens, and Levy 2020). I will then analyse three examples of news media devices that distribute the voices differently, identifying the associated issues — particularly with regard to the expected participation of the public. These three devices are (i) The Observers (France 24) as a website that covers « international current affairs by using eyewitness accounts from "Observers"” — that’s to say, making the user's discourse a raw and transparent material, as a result of direct experience; (ii) The Conversation UK, where the raw material is expert, scientific discourse, which is adapted to the media by information professionals; (iii) Vrai ou Fake (France Info), where journalists pick up the discourses circulating in media spaces (public statements, rumours, texts on social networks) to evaluate, check and, if necessary, debunk them.
In my case study, I will be careful to clarify the following points: what are the competing views, and how are they presented as reliable or not? What scene of enunciation (Maingueneau 2004) does the media construct, and what figures emerge through the dialogue of voices? How is the posture of superenunciation, ensuring the articulation of voices, assumed in the media device? What kind of intertext (blog posts, scientific references, witnesses, etc.) is being involved? What is the anticipation of the target audience, and how the dialogue with it is prepared? How does the digital interface, in its editorial enunciation (Jeanneret et Souchier 2005), anticipate the uses and circulations of these discourses — that is, other polyphonic takeovers? In other words, how polyphony, through the reworking of discourses and the shaping it operates in the media device, might organise the trivial circulation (Jeanneret 2008; 2014) of informational knowledge in different social spaces?
Bibliography
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