Le journalisme au service de l'économie

Abstract

Journalism at the service of the economy A look back over changes in economic journalism since the 1970s and 80s sheds light on the specific conditions governing the emergence of this form of journalism after 1945 : namely the establishment of relations between certain journalists who, because of their social characteristics, remain removed from a strictly "professional" logic and experience, their activity as something essentially "moral" and militant. They consent to entertain relations of subordination with government officials and union leaders engaged in "modernizing" the economy. This accounts in effect for the profound "originality" of French economic journalism (more attuned to the State than to business, to unions than to management, inclined to social reform and to maintaining a critical distance from the business world), but it should not make us forget the contingency of these relations or the forces that make them possible ; it also implicitly points to the limits of the journalist's autonomy. The present state of economic journalism could not have come about without the affinities shared by "pioneering" journalists of the day concerning "their" definition of economic news, without the discrediting of the financial press, without the confidential relations they entertained with their sources, whose outlook was largely shared by journalists and therefore appeared altogether "natural" to them, and without the absence of pressure from a public that was still to be invented and rallied to the "cause" of modernizing the country's economic system.