On the set of CNews, sociologist Michel Maffesoli recently declared that journalism stinks, that journalists repeat whatever it is convenient to repeat, and that a conformism, which he called logical while misquoting Durkheim, has replaced independent thought with echo. The line has circulated for years in almost identical forms, on CNews, on TVL, on Frontpopulaire, always closed with the same forecast, blood is going to flow. The diagnosis of the stench is not false. Any commercial company register confirms it, no need to cite anyone. What fails is the explanation, a collective cowardice of journalists turned into parrots, when what actually exists is a measurable architecture of ownership, with a political objective as precise as its balance sheet. In France and Colombia, two countries that share neither scale nor vocabulary of crisis, that architecture works in opposite directions but follows the same underlying logic.
Nine Fortunes, Three Fortunes, the Same Mechanism
In France, a handful of fortunes concentrates the national daily press, five billionaires own 93% of titles according to a bill proposed by Green MP Sophie Taillé-Polian, and nine copies out of every ten sold in the country belong to a handful of great fortunes, according to an independent investigation. Among them, Vincent Bolloré controls Canal+, CNews, C8, Europe 1, the Journal du Dimanche and Paris Match, plus 74% of the schoolbook market. Since he bought CNews in 2016, the channel rose from 0.7% audience share in 2017 to 2.8% in May 2024, overtaking BFMTV for the first time, through an editorial line centred on crime and immigration. The audiovisual regulator, Arcom, fined it 200,000 euros in 2021 for comments about migrant minors and 50,000 euros in 2024 for lacking journalistic honesty, and the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, separately ordered in February 2024 that Arcom rule again on whether the channel meets its pluralism obligations, a procedural order, not a conviction. The Journal du Dimanche, from the same group, ran a friendly cover interview with Rassemblement National president Jordan Bardella titled “Mon ambition pour la France” (“My ambition for France”). That strategy is not erratic, it has a measurable and profitable political direction, something Bolloré himself denies, before the French Senate he declared in 2022 that there was “no political ideology” in his media and that his investments answered purely economic criteria, a defence that the fine, the Conseil d’État order and the Bardella cover contradict in fact. This internal entanglement works very concretely in a group like this one, a single controversy can be born on CNews, picked up by Europe 1, illustrated in Paris Match and turned into a Journal du Dimanche editorial within hours, none of these outlets acting as an independent check on the others, all answering ultimately to the same shareholder. Bernard Arnault owns 90% of the financial press, L’Opinion, L’Agefi, Challenges. The Dassault family owns Le Figaro. Martin Bouygues owns TF1 and LCI. Rodolphe Saadé bought BFM, RMC and La Provence. Xavier Niel controls 15% of Le Monde, two decades after being one of the founding financiers of Mediapart in 2008, which does not stop him from also being, today, a shareholder in a historic daily. Patrick Drahi owns Libération. Daniel Křetínský owns Marianne and Elle.
Colombia reproduces the concentration with fewer players and less capital, not with less intensity. Luis Carlos Sarmiento, the country’s largest fortune, bought El Tiempo from the Santos family. Alejandro Santo Domingo, the second largest, controls Caracol Televisión, El Espectador and Blue radio, after selling Caracol Radio to the Spanish group Prisa, proof that abandoning one media segment implies no retreat from the logic of concentration, only a rearrangement within it. The Ardila Lülle family keeps RCN Radio and La República. None of the three families built their fortune in journalism, the Sarmientos come from banking, through Grupo Aval, the Santo Domingos from beer, the Ardila Lülles from soft drinks and sugar, the press arrived later, one more piece in a much broader diversification. The reverse of that concentration is equally measurable, according to an investigation by La Silla Vacía picked up by the magazine Cambio, Gustavo Petro’s government stopped placing official advertising in traditional private media and concentrated it entirely in the public broadcaster, RTVC. When information sits in the hands of a handful of fortunes, whoever governs against them does not negotiate space inside that infrastructure, it builds a parallel one. It is the same logic of ownership that in Paris amplifies the far right from within, operating in Bogotá from outside.
In France, 51% of print and digital media belong to companies from the financial and insurance sector, with an average ownership structure of 2.5 layers and six nodes that makes it hard to identify the ultimate owner, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Newsrooms Emptying Out, by Different Methods
The same ownership architecture helps explain what follows, decisions taken by diversified parent companies for whom the newsroom is one cost line among many, not the main source of their fortune. In France the emptying proceeds through automation and layoff plans. Close to 1,000 jobs disappeared between 2025 and 2026 across fourteen press groups. Prisma Media cut 261 of its 650 posts, 40% of staff. Centre France cut 10%. At Infopro Digital, nineteen journalists were replaced by five editing posts tasked with supervising AI-generated text. The newspaper L’Est Républicain has been publishing thousands of AI-written articles since 2023, without telling its readers. On 18 June 2026, journalists from several groups took to the streets in Paris, Toulouse and Montpellier, the first strike of this size against newsroom automation.
In Colombia the emptying proceeds through precarity and direct dismissal. According to the Foundation for Press Freedom, W Radio and Caracol Radio laid off 42 people in 2025. El Tiempo cut roughly 80 posts. El Espectador entirely dissolved its investigative unit, 13 journalists. RCN closed its radio operation after merging its stations. The same year’s national survey by FLIP and Cifras & Conceptos found that 56% of Colombian journalists earn less than three million pesos a month, that only 44% hold a permanent contract, and that 62% admit to self-censoring, dropping topics or considering leaving the profession.
What Durkheim Did Not Say and What Fear Adds
Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, called logical conformism the collective adherence to categories of thought that make shared intelligence possible, a thesis about the social conditions of cognition. Maffesoli makes him say something else, the submission of journalists to an imposed script, a leap he already practises with Nietzsche, to whom he regularly attributes a line about the stench of journalism whose authenticity not even his own readers can confirm. Thirty years before Maffesoli took that seat, Pierre Bourdieu had already described the real mechanism in On Television, a circular circulation of information among outlets that cite one another, all subject to the same pressure from ratings and advertisers. Bourdieu spoke of ratings and advertiser pressure, thirty years on that same pressure is measured in clicks, in time on page and, increasingly, in the cost per word that a language model allows a newsroom to save, the logic has not changed, it has only grown more efficient at extracting value with fewer people. Conformism is not born of a weakness of character, it is born of a balance sheet that demands immediate profitability and, increasingly, a political orientation that this profitability makes possible.
In Colombia that structural pressure adds a layer France does not know at the same scale, physical fear. FLIP documented 469 attacks on 305 journalists in 2025, fourteen forced displacements, seven exiles and one murder. Where the rule of law is weaker, the same logic that in Paris translates into a layoff, an algorithm occupying a post, or a friendly cover for the far right, can in Bogotá translate into a death threat. It is the same mechanism of concentrated ownership pushed to its most extreme and most brutal consequence, not a distinct phenomenon unrelated to the former.
Global trust in the media fell to 37% in 2026, its lowest level since 2015, and for the first time third-party platforms overtook direct sources as the gateway to information, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report.
An Accountant, Not a Prophet
France and Colombia show, in this, the two faces of the same coin, concentration amplifies from within when it serves established power, and expels from outside when it does not. This collapse in trust is not happening in a vacuum. 27% of users worldwide already turn to content creators to get informed about current events, and one in ten consults an AI chatbot directly, with a trust level that does not reach 20%, lower still than the traditional media it claims to distrust. That usage doubled in a year in Greece, Spain and South Korea, while it stagnated in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, a geography that coincides, not by accident, with that of the press systems most battered by the concentration and layoffs described above. It is also worth recalling who is delivering the diagnosis about CNews. Maffesoli supervised the 2001 doctoral thesis of astrologer Élizabeth Teissier at the Sorbonne, an episode much of the French academic community has cited for years as an example of contempt for scientific method. The magazine Slate described him as the troll of French sociology, and Acrimed, the critical media watchdog, called him a shoddy pretend expert, precisely for his habit of appearing on air with Sorbonne authority to back claims that same authority should prevent. This is not about discrediting the messenger to dodge the message, the stench of journalism remains real, but it is worth noting that the formula works because it combines an already eroded academic authority with a misquoted borrowed one, Durkheim, Nietzsche, dressing as analysis what is at bottom an after-dinner opinion repeated for three years on the same sets.
Maffesoli needs neither Durkheim nor Nietzsche for what he is actually saying. A company register, a spreadsheet and a court ruling for lack of pluralism would do. But naming the cowardice of a profession costs nothing and even earns applause, while naming the owner of the channel where he sits, fined twice by the regulator and under Conseil d’État scrutiny for lack of pluralism, carries a cost he, quite evidently, is not willing to pay. The submissive journalist he describes exists, no one denies it here, but he is the end product of a chain that begins much earlier, in the boardroom where someone decides to buy a newspaper, close a radio station, or run a friendly cover on a far-right candidate. Mistaking the symptom for the cause is not the error of a distracted sociologist, it is a comfortable way of looking elsewhere, particularly profitable when practised live on the screen of the very person who benefits most from that confusion. The blood Maffesoli forecasts with such confidence, if it ever flows, will not flow because of cowardly journalists. It will flow, if it flows, for the same reason there are fewer journalists today, less investigation and fewer uncomfortable questions, because someone decided, by name, that information pays better as a political weapon or a financial asset than as a public service…
G.S.
Sources
- Who owns the media in France?
- 9 milliardaires détiennent 90% de la presse française
- Billionaire Vincent Bolloré, the French Murdoch, steered Le Pen’s far right to the verge of power
- Suppressions d’emplois, encadrement de l’IA, concentration des médias, pourquoi la presse se met en grève
- Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report
- El emporio mediático de los tres más ricos de Colombia
- ¿Cuánto periodismo puede perder una democracia?
- Petro les corta la publicidad a los medios y la gasta en RTVC
- Gobierno Petro concentra sus gastos de pauta publicitaria en RTVC y destina poco a medios privados
- Pluralisme et independance de l’information, l’Arcom devra se prononcer a nouveau sur le respect par CNews de ses obligations
- Devant les senateurs, Vincent Bollore assure qu’il n’y a aucune ideologie politique dans ses medias
- Michel Maffesoli sur CNEWS
- Michel Maffesoli, le troll de la sociologie française
- Michel Maffesoli, « expert » sociologique de pacotille
