34 - Travailleurs, travailleuses !
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Claire Sécail
The striker, the user and the reporter. Strikes in the news since the 1960s
Le Temps des médias n° 34, Printemps 2020, p. 24-45.
At the crossroads of social history and media history, this article looks at how television news conveys a vision of the political power relations and social struggles that have been displayed in the public space during strikes in industrial relations since the 1960s. To what extent does the televised account of the strike highlight certain social, political, economic, legal and cultural developments that are at work in French society? Based on a sampling of television news items, we first carried out a quantitative analysis of a corpus of 2290 thematically coded « strike » subjects, then a qualitative analysis of a sub-corpus on the case of strikes in public transport, in order to bring to light certain characteristics of these accounts and the figures they portray. Because strikes in the transport sector have a singular resonance by directly affecting the daily lives of French people, they impose the figure of a « user victim » in television coverage. As a testimony to the social acceptance of strikes as shaped by television, the analysis of this coverage allows us to grasp some of the narrative and political logics at work.