Will you be Free® tonight?

So, today, La Première, NRJ, DH Radio; Le Soir, La Libre, La Dernière Heure; RTL-TVI, Plug RTL, RTBF? What does it matter? Underneath the illusory freedom to choose your « media » lies the fact that all the options you can make come down to the same thing, despite the few visible differences in form and content. Because behind apparent differences, all propagate the same and unique version of the world, remain confined within the same possibilities, delimiting the impossible as soon as the tacit limits are crossed.

To see, read and hear them, there would never be anything to change fundamentally in the world as it is: destruction of nature caused by our lifestyles, over-investment in productive work, denial of the suffering it generates and absence of reflection on meaning, misery and inequalities, stigmatization of unemployment that employment inevitably generates, absence of questioning of the technological everything, etc. « In the eyes of most journalists, the « modern » world is inherently good (…) nothing negative (exploitation, oppression, massive unemployment, wars, waste of human and natural resources, etc.) is really attributable to the very essence of capitalism »⁽¹⁾. There would seem to be a total absence of questioning of the religion of growth and the hyper-consumerism that it requires. It would be enough just to palliate — which comes from the Latin « to cover with a coat »! — the evils that the system engenders.

Why, when you decide to buy La Libre rather than Le Soir, to watch RTBF rather than RTL, are you basically not free to choose? Rather than seeing these different media as a kind of undifferentiated caste of malicious journalists, it is more useful to look at the ownership of these media⁽²⁾the sociological composition of their editorial staff and the advertising medium they represent. From this point on, the identical imprint of the same ideology can be seen in all the editorial offices: that of the market as king and consumption as a model of society.