Once, I heard an American journalist condemn Fox News. The condemnation was deserved, in my opinion. However, the argument meant to justify it was frightening. Why – did the journalist ask – should Fox News be allowed to exist while its position contradicts that of all other American journalistic institutions?

In my view this journalist was not attacking Fox News. He was challenging the very possibility of debate. He was pointing to a consensus and requiring that dissenting voices be silenced. Obama was perfectly right in stressing that they should not (while still being critical of their position in a Rolling Stone article. Obama’s point is essential to the very existence of a democratic pluralism. Obama was no less correct in noting: “We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated.” This tradition is also ingrained in European journalistic traditions, and, in particular, in the French.

Interestingly, it is not this tradition that retained the attention of some of the most radical media critics. (I am thinking of such thinkers as Roland Barthes or Stuart Hall.) For them, the real danger lies not with those media discourses that flaunt their ideological positions, hoist their flag, advance in fanfare, scream their values. Such discourses are unmistakeably partisan. They are too strident not to be instantly spotted .

The real danger is with these other discourses that are so persuasive that they can be conflated with “reality.” It lies with discourses that seem neutral, balanced, fair, often intelligent . The real danger is with discourses that seem “self evident.” Such an evidence – present in the consensus that the journalist in my first paragraph pointed to — speaks of the power enjoyed by those groups who become the “primary definers” of the social world (Hall); of the power of constructing reality, of multiplying ‘effects of real‘ (Barthes); of the power that stems from ideology, understood not as a discrete doctrine, but as an almost spontaneous “way of seeing“ (a spontaneity that begs, of course, to be deciphered).

I tend to share the concerns of Barthes and Hall. The antics of Fox News perpetuate an opinionated tradition. But what of realistic, fair, balanced, sober news discourses? Does anyone seriously believe they are blank? Devoid of opinion? Empty of ideologies ?

I believe that social realities are not merely “recorded” for our sake by media institutions. They are recorded in order to be shown and they are shown for a purpose. Showing has a rationale and this rationale is translated into recording protocols. Showing or –as I call it , with a French accent, “Monstration“– is always an action , as opposed to the mechanical operation of monitoring machines. Showing consists of directing your gaze. Would anyone take hold of your gaze for no purpose at all? What are then the acts performed, especially when “monstrations” seem routine, banal, devoid of a special purpose?

This takes us away from Fox News as stage-villain that everybody (in our circles) loves to hate, to another form of theater. In plays such as The Exception and The Rule,  Bertolt Brecht points to the kinship between the “obvious,” and the abusive. What seems evident is often so because evidence is just another name for Power.