Attestational Dramaturgy

Journalism traditionally presents itself as privileged access to reality. Its everyday practice, however, very often consists of summoning the real as an illustration of narratives decided in advance. How can we name, with some precision, this gesture that presents itself as testimony while being staging? I am trying here to build an analytical tool that does not merge with the notion of spectacle, nor with that of simulacrum, nor with that of propaganda, and that can shed light on both the mundane report on motorway traffic jams and the media treatment of major collective crises.

The illusion of direct access to reality

Everyone has known for a long time that the media construct a representation of the world and do not transmit it as it is. This critique has belonged to common sense for at least half a century. Yet this theoretical knowledge does not prevent us, in daily practice, from continuing to receive journalistic information as if it were, give or take a few biases, a faithful reflection of what happened. The asymmetry is striking: we know that journalism constructs the real, and we believe in it nonetheless. This dissociation deserves to be questioned, and it is the purpose of this text to shed some light on it.

Part of the answer lies in the power of the formal codes that surround journalistic practice. Being on location, live broadcasting, the microphone held out to the witness, the so-called “raw” image, the mention of sources — all of this contributes to producing an attestation effect that operates well below critical reason. It matters little that we know, intellectually, that this apparatus is traversed by orientations: the form itself persuades us that we are being placed in the presence of the real. Roland Barthes, in Le bruissement de la langue (1984), spoke in relation to journalism of a “reality effect”: it is not so much the referent that produces adherence as the form of the discourse that relates to it.

What interests me here is not to denounce this construction of the real — an operation too often conducted in a moralising mode — but to describe its mechanism ethnographically. It is a particular operation, very common, very effective, and yet poorly named. I encounter it every time a journalist calls me for a report with a thesis already in mind that needs to be illustrated. I recognise it in the broadcasts in which I have taken part, when my words end up, at the editing stage, bent to fit the preconceived narrative of the authors. I saw it, pushed to its paroxysm, during the Covid crisis. And I recognise it finally in a short video recently published on social media by a former TF1 correspondent, who exposes with rare clarity one of its production mechanisms. It is with her that I shall begin.

A confession from inside the apparatus

On 18 April 2026, I come across a video by Emma Vinzent on social media. She is a journalist who was a regional correspondent for TF1 for three years, then their correspondent in India for a year (I have included a full transcription of her intervention in the appendix to this article). She opens with an excerpt from one of her own reports. We see her, microphone in hand, standing on a bridge over a motorway, not far from the Vienne tollgate, just before Lyon. She announces live that “things are already slowing down”. Behind her, cars are flowing normally. There is, as she unreservedly acknowledges, no slowdown at all. “That’s me, but I’m not proud of it. I’m doing a live feed for TF1 about traffic jams, when there are obviously no traffic jams behind me.”

What follows in her video is worth all the treatises on the sociology of media. Emma Vinzent explains that TF1, like most channels, contracts out its regional reporting to production companies based in Lyon, Marseille, Lille or Bordeaux. These companies produce the reports and sell them per unit, around two thousand euros for two minutes. When a generic (non-regional) subject needs to be covered — a rise in petrol prices, a cold snap, a traffic slowdown — the Paris editorial team calls the regional offices and asks them to find “people who are unhappy at the pump” or “a petrol station manager”. The first office to deliver wins the contract.

From this mechanism, the journalist herself draws this conclusion: “instead of having correspondents who report on what they observe in the field, we often have editors in chief who, from Paris, dictate what the report should look like”. The terrain no longer precedes the narrative; it is the narrative that summons the terrain, and assigns it its role.

The ethnographic value of such a confession should be measured. Critical studies on the media rarely suffer from a shortage of theory; they suffer from a shortage of internal testimony. Here, however, a practitioner delivers, in the very format she is criticising, the ordinary workings of her profession. It is neither an exception (the story of the non-existent traffic jams) nor an individual failing (Emma Vinzent herself admits having made this report), but a structural routine. And if this mechanism operates for traffic jams at the Vienne tollgate, how could we imagine it would not apply, with vastly amplified power, to the major subjects that collectively concern our societies: wars, epidemics, social movements, politics, ecology?

The fundamental inversion: the narrative precedes the real

Journalism traditionally presents itself as an activity based on a simple epistemic sequence:

1. Something happens in the world.
2. The journalist witnesses it, or receives a reliable testimony (preferably several cross-checked testimonies).
3. They report what happened.

The formal codes of the profession — presence on location, live broadcasting, witness interviews, “raw” images — all contribute to reinforcing this promise: an attestation based on direct perception of the real, or, failing that, on sources whose credibility has been verified (what is now called fact-checking, which is indeed the sign of an intrinsic distrust, since journalistic manipulations have been publicly documented for a very long time — it is a known fact. And yet…).

What Emma Vinzent’s video shows is the exact inversion of this sequence. The narrative precedes the encounter with the real. The terrain appears only as an illustration of an argument written in Paris. The journalist does not report what she sees; she confirms the act of seeing what has been decided before her arrival. The real is no longer the source of information; it becomes its illustration.

This inversion goes far beyond the case of TF1. It structures the vast majority of contemporary journalistic production. Pierre Bourdieu, in Sur la télévision (1996), had named one of its mechanisms: the “circular circulation of information”. Journalists read and watch each other, quote each other, build their angles in reference to one another. The result is not a plurality of viewpoints, but a paradoxical homogenisation, produced by competition itself. But the circular circulation only describes part of the phenomenon. It describes how the narrative stabilises among journalists. It does not describe how the real then comes to submit to it.

The ethnologist Bronislaw Malinowski, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), formulated the opposite requirement of this approach: “The final goal, of which an ethnographer should never lose sight, is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.” The ethnographer proceeds from a radical openness: they start from the assumption that what they will encounter will not correspond to their hypotheses, and it is precisely this gap that gives the inquiry its value. Contemporary journalism proceeds in the opposite way: the thesis has already been sold to the newsroom, and the encounter is only sought in view of its confirmation. The interlocutor is no longer a subject likely to reveal a world; they are only an illustration, favourable or hostile, but always inscribed in a narrative whose main lines are already drawn.

Attestational dramaturgy: proposing a concept

I propose to name this apparatus attestational dramaturgy. The term brings two inseparable dimensions into tension:

• A dramaturgy, because the real is staged here according to the needs of a preconceived narrative, following what Bourdieu identified as the main driver of flow journalism: manufacturing conflict, tension, narrative suspense, on pain of losing attention.
• An attestation, because this staging presents itself as testimony, and claims the epistemic prerogatives of direct observation.

Neither pure fiction nor deliberate lie, attestational dramaturgy designates this particular gesture: confirming the act of bearing witness, by summoning real elements in the service of a narrative that precedes them.

What is manufactured, in Emma Vinzent’s report at the Vienne tollgate, is not the raw content of the image (there are indeed cars, there is indeed a tollgate, there are indeed sometimes traffic jams); it is its interpretative framework, its narrative framing, its function as illustration of a predefined thesis. The apparatus does not produce false information in the sense understood by devices fighting “fake news”. It produces real illustrations of a narrative whose truthfulness is never questioned. Fact-checking is powerless against such a device, since there are indeed cars, there is indeed a motorway, and Emma Vinzent is indeed at the Vienne tollgate. Everything is true, and yet nothing is informative. It is precisely this reversal that my concept of attestational dramaturgy attempts to capture.

It is important to distinguish attestational dramaturgy from a few neighbouring concepts, from which it borrows without merging with them:

• Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), describes a general condition: “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”. Attestational dramaturgy operates within this condition, but names a more specific mechanism: the one by which journalistic information, while fully participating in the logic of spectacle, conceals its effects beneath the appearances of neutral testimony. The spectacle is the condition of possibility; attestational dramaturgy is one of its ordinary regimes of production.

• Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), describes a regime where the sign no longer refers to any referent, where simulation “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance”. Attestational dramaturgy, on the contrary, always retains a relationship, even minimal, even instrumentalised, to a referent. There are indeed traffic jams in France, and sometimes at the Vienne tollgate. The real is not abolished, it is subordinated. This subordination is more insidious than pure simulation in Baudrillard’s sense, because it can always invoke the real for support, saying “but the traffic jam exists, look”, while its meaning has been constructed elsewhere.

• Daniel Boorstin, in The Image (1961), proposed the concept of pseudo-event: an event manufactured for media coverage, such as a press conference or a product launch. Attestational dramaturgy is even more subtle. It does not require that the event be fabricated ex nihilo. It can operate on real events by imposing on them an interpretative framework that transfigures them. The Covid health crisis was a real event; its attestational dramaturgy was a construction that produced, from this reality, a secondary reality very different from the experience lived by frontline healthcare workers and by people ill with Covid, or not.

• Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in Manufacturing Consent (1988), describe the economic and political structure that orients the production of information: capital concentration, dependence on advertising, privileged sources, pressures, dominant ideology. This structural analysis is indispensable. However, it does not say what the daily practice is by which structural filters are translated into concrete forms. Attestational dramaturgy is this practice. It names the ordinary operation by which structural constraints are transformed, day after day, into narratives that present themselves as attestation.

• David Colon, in Propagande. La manipulation de masse dans le monde contemporain (2019), warns against a false but convenient idea: to believe that contemporary propaganda operates through lies. On the contrary, it operates mainly through the manipulation of established facts. “When propaganda tells the ’truth’,” writes Colon, “the individual then becomes convinced that it is no longer propaganda.” This is exactly the structure of attestational dramaturgy: presenting partial truths within an oriented interpretative framework is more effective than pure lying, because it is harder to unmask. While Colon speaks of propaganda when the orientation is deliberate and conscious, attestational dramaturgy also unfolds — and perhaps especially — when nobody perceives it as such, neither the journalists who practise it nor the public who receive it.

• Gilles Deleuze, in his lecture What Is the Creative Act? (1987), offered a powerful formulation: “Information is the controlled system of order-words that circulate in a given society.” For him, information is not a neutral content but an injunction: it tells us what we should think, and not what happened. Attestational dramaturgy is precisely the formal regime by which these order-words present themselves as observations, where the injunction poses as attestation. The fact that information takes the form of on-location testimony is what allows the injunction to pass for factual observation.

• Peter Watkins, the recently deceased filmmaker, had identified in Media Crisis (2004) what he called the “monoform”: the single, uninterrupted narrative form that structures the global journalistic flow and makes any critical thinking impossible, for lack of pauses, silences, spaces for thought to unfold. Attestational dramaturgy deploys itself across this saturated temporal continuum, which carries attention along without ever letting it settle. Combined with the monoform, it becomes formidable: not only is the narrative preconceived, it is also served in a temporality that forbids critical distance.

• Niklas Luhmann, in The Reality of the Mass Media (1996), explicates the structuring codes of this production: novelty, conflict, quantification. Three imperatives which, combined, impose a dramaturgical treatment on any real content. Anything that is not new, conflictual or quantifiable simply cannot appear as information in the current apparatus. The real enters at the price of a dramatic shaping that is the very condition of its visibility, and therefore of its veracity itself.

A genealogy of the apparatus

Attestational dramaturgy is not a new phenomenon. It has a history, which can be briefly sketched.

Chris Marker, in Letter from Siberia (1957), had demonstrated, through a now-famous filmic gesture, how three different commentaries applied to the same images produce three radically opposed realities. The sequence is simple: in a street in Yakutsk (then USSR), a red bus passes by, a worker repairs the roadway, a Yakut person crosses the camera’s field. The same shots, rigorously identical, are then commented on three times.

In the first version, the voiceover deploys Soviet propagandist enthusiasm. Yakutsk is presented as a modern capital where “comfortable” buses move alongside “powerful Zim cars” carrying “joyful Soviets” to their work, driven by the ardour of workers who are “heroes of communist labour”. The scene becomes the celebration of socialist emulation.

In the second version, the voiceover adopts an anti-Soviet register. Yakutsk becomes a “dark city” bearing the “sinister reputation” of its camps; “gloomy Soviet buses” struggle there, the Yakut person appears as a “colonised” people reduced to forced labour, under the gaze of “well-fed cops”. The same street, the same bus, the same worker become the setting for a concentration camp universe.

In the third version, finally, the voiceover attempts a falsely objective register. Yakutsk is compared to a French provincial town, the bus is described as “less crowded than its Parisian counterpart at the same hour”, the worker as an ordinary labourer. This apparent neutrality is itself revealed to be a point of view, a framing, a choice of implicit equivalences that say a great deal about the position of the one speaking.

Marker thus demonstrates that images, on their own, produce no meaning. It is narratives that organise them, caption them, inscribe them in a political grammar. Attestational dramaturgy functions on exactly this principle, except that it never presents itself as three possible versions of the same reality. It claims, each time, to produce the only true version. The comic and critical effect of Marker’s device comes precisely from the juxtaposition of commentaries; this is what is structurally missing from ordinary journalistic information, which presents each of its narrative stagings as if it were the only possible one.

The Timișoara mass grave, in December 1989, marks another decisive step. The images of corpses presented as victims of a massacre ordered by Ceaușescu circulated for several days through all European newsrooms. It would later be learned that these bodies were those of deceased people exhumed from an ordinary common grave. Ignacio Ramonet, in a now-famous article, “Télévision nécrophile”, published in Le Monde diplomatique in March 1990, wrote that “it was not so much the substance that mattered (the mass grave was a staging), but the suggestive power of images of death”. An illuminating formulation: attestational dramaturgy functions less through substance than through the emotional force of images, summoned as illustration of a preset narrative.

Daniel Dayan, in his work on “media events” (2000), identified the ritual and ceremonial dimension of these devices. Televised broadcasts of funerals, disasters, and major crises function as collective ceremonies that gather the population around shared emotion. Information there is secondary; what matters is affective co-presence, ritualised communion around the screen. Attestational dramaturgy is rooted in this ceremonial function of journalism — a function that is not accidental but perhaps constitutes its deep anthropological horizon. What television produces every evening at eight o’clock, and today through sharing on social media, is not mainly information. It is a rite, whose form is that of attestation.

Paul Virilio, finally, devoted part of his work to showing how television and live broadcasting are no longer the mirror of political events, but their very site of production. For him, an event only “takes place” today in proportion to its real-time media visibility. The television coverage of the Gulf War in 1991, which he analyses in L’Écran du désert (1991), constitutes the first historical case in which a war is played out as much in viewers’ living rooms as on the battlefield. This observation takes on its full scope in the age of 24-hour news channels and social media: the event no longer exists until it is attested by live images. It is in daily practice that attestational dramaturgy makes this media ontology operate. To explore Paul Virilio’s thought further, you can watch the film « À propos du XXI^e Siècle » that I co-directed with Martine Stora in 1994.

Two personal experiences, before and during the crisis

I would now like to bring two personal experiences into this analysis, not as anecdotes, but because they document precisely the structure Emma Vinzent describes, and do so outside any polemical context — well before the Covid crisis which crystallised suspicions about mainstream journalism, but also suspicions about those who were suspicious.

The first takes place nearly ten years ago, long before Covid. A journalist from France Télévisions contacts me with a view to a report for the eight o’clock news on young people making videos with their mobile phones. Having founded the Pocket Films Festival at the Forum des Images in 2005, I am identified as a reference on these questions. She asks me whether I could point her, within my activities, to young people she could come and film in this practice. Her formulation is revealing: “All young people make videos with mobile phones, it’s a social phenomenon.”

My first question, naive: if all young people do it, why ask me? She does not really have an answer. I suggest several contexts. A workshop I am about to run at La Fémis, the French national film school. Response: “Those are not real young people.” A workshop I am preparing in a secondary school. Response: “Those are not real young people.” A third workshop in the social sector. Response, again: “Those are not real young people.”

I then allowed myself a remark, which is exactly the argument of this article: “You tell me this is a social reality. I offer you proposals in various real contexts. And you tell me these are not the right ones. It seems to me that, in your work, you are looking in the real for what corresponds to your idea, rather than investigating what is.” The journalist took my remark very badly, vehemently insisted on her professional seriousness, and ended our exchange. She did not come. I do not know what report she eventually produced, but I know she probably found the “real young people” who corresponded to her preconceived narrative elsewhere.

What strikes me in retrospect, and which seems to me valuable for my argument here, is that this journalist had, unlike Emma Vinzent, no reflexive awareness of the apparatus within which she was operating. She firmly believed she was in direct contact with reality. She found any remark pointing to the prior orientation of her inquiry insulting. This episode dates from long before Covid. The easily mobilised reproach of a “conspiracy theorist” retrospective reading produced by the Covid crisis cannot therefore be levelled at it. Attestational dramaturgy is the ordinary structure of the journalistic profession, regardless of the subjects treated and political contexts. But depending on the subjects, its consequences are more or less serious. This is precisely why it seems important to me to shed light on this point.

The second experience concerns an Arte programme in which I took part in 2023, in the series Le dessous des images, devoted to an amateur video filmed in China during the zero-Covid policy. My interview lasted about thirty minutes. At the editing stage, the authors selected the few sentences that corresponded to their prior editorial line, leaving aside the actual argument I had developed and the conclusion I reached. On my website, I published the integral recording of the interview alongside the edit broadcast on air, precisely so that anyone could compare. The gap is eloquent. I did not become, in the edit, what I had said; I became what the team was trying to get a contributor to say.

Here again, I do not believe in bad faith. I believe in the structural operation of an attestational dramaturgy that asks its contributors to bring their piece to the already-assembled puzzle. What does not fit is eliminated, not out of malice but out of dramaturgical necessity. The narrative must hold, broadcast time is constrained, angles must converge. The contributor is summoned to attest to a point, not to develop their thinking. And this is precisely the difference between a journalistic interview and an ethnographic conversation.

Covid, paradigm of attestational dramaturgy

If this staging apparatus operates for phantom traffic jams at the Vienne tollgate, or for mundane reports on teenage practices, what happens when it comes to covering a global health crisis?

Laurent Mucchielli, a sociologist and research director at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), has documented in detail, in Défendre la démocratie. Une sociologie engagée (2023), the behaviour of French journalists during the Covid crisis. His analysis overlaps point by point with the structure I call attestational dramaturgy. He writes: “The fear and panic aroused by the shocking images on television, reactivated by the daily staging of death through the great televised ceremony (the Director General of Health’s daily speech enumerating the number of hospitalised and dead), are the starting point of this story.” The phrase “televised ceremony” is illuminating: Mucchielli recognises the ritual dimension Dayan had theorised, and applies it to the Covid event.

The daily cumulation of death figures is itself a textbook case of attestational dramaturgy. The figures were accurate, or nearly so. Their presentation, on the other hand, produced an affect disproportionate to their actual epidemiological significance. Compared to the total French population (sixty-seven million inhabitants) and to ordinary annual mortality (about six hundred thousand deaths per year, all causes combined), the daily figures communicated during press conferences did not trace the existential catastrophe that their ceremonial presentation implied. Several voices — comedians, entertainment show hosts, frontline doctors — eventually pointed out, often too late, the effect produced by this accumulation: turning figures into affect, and a daily figure into collective existential experience. The form of presentation did the essential persuasive work, independently of the informational content of the data. Had the daily death count been presented as a percentage of the French population and alongside normal mortality figures, one would not have seen a difference — since there were no more deaths in France in 2020-2021 than in previous years, and even slightly fewer! But that would not have supported the well-intentioned discourse which held that people had to be afraid in order not to spread the virus.

The images of Bergamo, in Italy, in mid-March 2020, with their military trucks transporting coffins, functioned as a visual matrix. They were not false. But they illustrated a narrative — that of an absolute threat justifying absolute measures — that exceeded them. Heinz Bude, a German sociologist and member of a confidential scientific commission tasked with accompanying the German government, testified that these shocking images functioned, within the expert groups themselves, as emotional accelerators allowing hesitations about the acceptability of freedom-restricting measures to be overcome (Aus dem Maschinenraum der Beratung in Zeiten der Pandemie, Soziologie, 2022). The image was not informing; it was deciding. It produced the affective conditions of its own interpretation. Ignacio Ramonet, in 1990, would probably not have been surprised.

Another, more rarely noted, example is that of so-called saturated hospitals. The mainstream narrative presented a hospital system on the brink of collapse, based on images filmed in a few intensive care units that were indeed overwhelmed. Meanwhile, on platforms less visible than the major social networks, healthcare workers — nurses in particular — were posting live videos from their empty facilities, especially from private clinics that never received Covid patients. The institutional choice to direct patients to certain facilities rather than others mechanically produced images of saturation on one side, and emptiness on the other. The cameras were placed where they suited the narrative. What is produced here is not a simple biased representation: it is a policy. Images of saturation justified restrictions, which in turn generated major economic, social, and psychological effects. Attestational dramaturgy is not only a media phenomenon; it produces reality.

One final feature deserves to be underlined, which touches on the very concept of attestation and constitutes a particularly striking version of it. During the first lockdown in France in 2020, the French population was required to fill out, for any outing from home, a “derogatory travel attestation”. Each citizen thus had to produce, as a self-declaration, an attestation of the reality of their own outing, conforming to one of the legally accepted motives. This document could be filled out as many times as needed, by the concerned person themselves, and it thus included no independent verification whatsoever! It was intrinsically a fake-real document. From a legal standpoint, self-attestation is an absurd construction: it verifies nothing, since it is produced by the person whose activity is to be attested. It does however produce a real effect — that of incorporating an administrative category into consciousness and behaviour. Each person learned to describe themselves according to the categories of power, to render themselves compliant with its expectations, to produce, on themselves, the discourse that fits.

This self-attestation administrative device is, in many respects, the exact analogue, in the legal domain, of journalistic attestational dramaturgy. In both cases, a discourse is produced that attests to a reality, according to a pre-existing framework that defines its acceptable categories. In both cases, the attestation verifies nothing; it institutes, it brings into compliance. That the first lockdown generalised this administrative practice as a daily gesture is probably no accident. It is one of the ways in which attestational dramaturgy, stepping outside the journalistic field alone, massively structured our lives during this period.

Throughout the crisis, dissident voices were gathered under a single term, “conspiracy theory”, in a gesture of disqualification whose mechanics Mucchielli has meticulously reconstructed. For example, the daily Libération, like many others, devoted a dossier to scientists labelled “reassurists”, presented as irresponsible because they were “disheartening the poor hospital workers”. The device is here exemplary: faced with scientific arguments that journalists could not answer on substance, statistical argumentation was replaced by moral argument, and critics by characters from a moral theatre — evil conspiracy theorists or heroic resisters, as the needs of the narrative required. The dramaturgy needed antagonists; it found them.

What was played out during those two years was not a simple media coverage. It was an attestational dramaturgy pushed to its paroxysm, in which the journalistic apparatus, by summoning each evening the shocking images, the anxiety-inducing curves, the carefully selected testimonies, produced the collective affect necessary for the acceptance of measures unprecedented in peacetime. Journalists did not lie, or rarely. They attested, in the strict sense, to a reality staged according to a narrative decided elsewhere. Attestational dramaturgy, in its most efficient functioning, never lets itself be seen as dramaturgy. Therein lies its political strength, and therein lies also its intellectual vulnerability: it is enough to name it, to conceptualise it, to render it visible.

An earlier example: cameras in front of La Pitié-Salpêtrière (November 2015)

The device, once again, is not new. I would like to mention another case, predating the health crisis, which had particularly struck me. On the morning after the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris, the cameras of the 24-hour news channels were massed in front of a few symbolic places, notably the entrance of La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, where some of the Bataclan wounded were being treated. That had struck me as I walked along the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, entirely empty, except in front of that entrance. The visual device concentrated attention on these few spots, as if the rest of Paris did not exist. Yet the city, as a whole, was at that moment strangely empty, silent, suspended. That emptiness, that collective suspension, that mute waiting — the cameras did not film it. They did not have the dramaturgical means to film it.

Someone in shock, walking through Paris in those days, would have seen something quite other than what the channels were broadcasting. A Paris of quiet mourning, of tenuous but real social ties, of strangers talking to each other in the streets. That reality was not “photogenic”, in the sense that it did not allow the construction of a dramatic narrative conforming to the apparatus’s expectations. Attestational dramaturgy, faced with the attacks, thus chose to attest, once again, to the expected narrative: the besieged hospital, the “forces of order” (not “peacekeepers”) mobilised, the experts summoned to studios. The rest, which was however the most massive part of the real, was made invisible — not by censorship, but by the formal impossibility of inscribing it within the existing media grammar.

This was an important lesson for me. I understood that day, as if seeing the reverse side of a theatre set, that the images produced by the apparatus are not false; they are simply partial in a very precise way — that is, oriented by the needs of a narrative. And what the narrative cannot accommodate remains, literally, off-screen. The off-screen is perhaps the most useful concept for understanding attestational dramaturgy: what it says is real, what it remains silent about is immense, and it is in that gap that it operates politically.

Why do we still believe? An ethnographic reading of reception

It would be tempting, at this point in the analysis, to conclude that the public is naïve, infantilised, voluntarily servile. This conclusion would be wrong, and above all contemptuous. The ethnographic approach, to which I hold in all my work, consists precisely in not psychologising social phenomena, in not reducing them to individual flaws, but in seeking what, in the very structure of interaction, produces the observed effects.

Why, despite everything, do we still believe? The answer lies, it seems to me, less in epistemology than in the anthropology of social ties. Watching the eight o’clock news or sharing information on social networks is not, for the vast majority of viewers, an act of information in the strict sense. It is a rite of co-presence. It is the act by which one shares, at the same hour, with millions of other people, a common narrative that creates the common. Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), described the “collective effervescence” produced by shared rituals, capable of gathering the members of a society around shared affects. The televised news is, in many respects, one of the major rituals of our secularised societies, and its contemporary modalities (push alerts, continuous live broadcasts, news feeds) have only intensified this dimension, far from weakening it.

Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (1925), had developed the notion of “total social fact”, which simultaneously mobilises the legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, and affective. Contemporary media consumption is a total social fact. It mobilises fear, identification, indignation, narrative pleasure, the sense of belonging. It is not a simple transmission of information; it is an apparatus that constitutes us as members of a community. And this constitution operates all the more effectively because it does not have to make itself explicit: it catches us from underneath, through affect, through the ritualisation of our days.

From this perspective, the demand for propositional truth is only one of the dimensions of reception, and probably not the most decisive. We do not watch the news to know what is true; we watch it to experience the fact of being together in a shared narrative. To question the truthfulness of the narrative is, very concretely, to risk disinscribing oneself from the social tie it carries. Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), showed that cultures are systems of meanings that hold together precisely because they are collectively held to be true. Attestational dramaturgy draws its power from the fact that it does not address the rational individual, but the member of a community who needs to co-experience a common world.

This is why fact-checking, in which many media education devices place their hopes, is largely powerless to undo attestational dramaturgy. It operates within the same grammar (that of propositional truth) and leaves intact the ceremonial device that holds the tie together. One does not respond to a rite with factual verification. At best, fact-checking corrects the most visible slip-ups; it does not touch the structure — on the contrary, it supports it.

What journalists do, in ethnographic terms

There remain the journalists themselves. Here we must guard against a facility that blocks understanding: moral denunciation. Journalists, in their vast majority, are not cynical. Many sincerely believe in the democratic value of their work. They come out of schools where they have been taught ethics, source verification, the Munich Charter of 1971. And yet, collectively, they produce what I call here an attestational dramaturgy. How can this be explained without falling into conspiracy theory, whose analytical inadequacy is patent?

The most convincing explanation is that proposed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). The authors show how every profession comes to institutionalise its practices to the point of confusing them with the reality they claim to serve. This process of “institutional objectivation” transforms social conventions into natural obviousness. Journalists are no exception. Their working methods, historically constituted and socially situated, come to appear as the only possible path to true information. Attestational dramaturgy has become transparent to them. They do what their profession does, with the good conscience that professional obviousness confers. Emma Vinzent, in her video, essentially recounts a retrospective awakening: when she was making the report, she was participating; today, a step aside has made her capable of seeing what she was doing.

Claude Lévi-Strauss would have spoken, in the face of this phenomenon, of a professional myth. The journalist experiences themselves as a cultural hero, as mediator between the chaos of events and the order of meaning, as guardian of the truth against the forces of disinformation. This myth is no less real than those Lévi-Strauss studied in Amazonian societies. It fulfils the same anthropological function: it legitimises a social position, justifies privileges, founds authority. It allows those who inhabit it to make sense of their practice, even when that practice is, from an external point of view, quite something other than what it says it is. Reading journalists through the anthropology of myths is not to reduce them; on the contrary, it is to restore to them their anthropological dignity, which is not the artificial one that their profession gives itself.

One can add, with Gilles Deleuze, that “information is the controlled system of order-words that circulate in a given society” (What Is the Creative Act?, 1987). Journalists do not freely choose their order-words: they are taken within a field that precedes them, shapes them, and constrains them. The notion of “journalism schools” is revealing here: what is taught there is precisely the codes of a trade — that is, the conditions of entry into a dramaturgy. A student who refused these codes would not be considered more honest, but simply disqualified as non-professional. The trade produces its own evaluation criteria, which are not those of truth, but those of dramaturgical conformity.

Exiting the belief

How, then, to exit the belief? Certainly not by expecting journalists themselves to offer a self-critique of the apparatus that constitutes them. One cannot ask the apparatus to self-dissolve; that is contrary to its function. Emma Vinzent’s video is precious precisely because it is rare, and it must remain so, for the moment, for the apparatus to continue to function. To entrust media education to journalists, as I have often stressed, is like entrusting the pharmaceutical industry with training in the critical use of medicines. It is a structural impossibility, without prejudging the individual good faith of the people concerned.

The way out, I believe, is only possible through a reversal of posture, and this is what media education should teach as a priority. The point is not to ask whether this or that piece of information is “true” or “false” — a question that leaves intact the apparatus that produces the very category of information. The point is to look at journalism for what it is, from an ethnographic viewpoint: a cultural practice, historically situated, that manufactures narratives for collective use according to identifiable economic, dramaturgical and institutional constraints. Neither lie, nor truth, nor even manipulation in the classical sense: a cultural production, which deserves to be analysed as such, with the tools that anthropology, sociology and semiology have patiently elaborated to study other cultural productions.

This requires breaking with the founding illusion according to which journalism would be the privileged site of access to reality. I have been fighting this illusion for years in my pedagogical practices — not through denunciation but through creation. Having those who follow my training courses themselves manufacture images and narratives allows them to experience, from within, how much every representation is construction, every narrative is choice, every piece of information is orientation. It is this embodied experience, more than any lesson on “fake news”, that allows access to a genuinely critical posture in relation to attestational dramaturgy. One does not deconstruct a rite through argument; one becomes lucid by having manufactured images oneself, and having discovered within them the choices one had thought obvious.

Emma Vinzent concludes her video by noting that the economic model she describes is widespread across all television channels. She is right, and her lucidity deserves to be saluted. But this economic model is only one face of the apparatus. Attestational dramaturgy does not rest solely on the outsourcing of reports to production companies. It rests on a conception of journalism as privileged attestation of the real — a conception that structures the whole profession far beyond economic and political questions, and concerns sincere journalists as much as declared propagandists. To give up this conception, to accept that journalism is a cultural form among others, not sovereign, not overhanging, would surely be the first step towards a media education worthy of the name. A step that journalists will not take in our place. It is up to us, as citizens, as voluntary ethnographers of our own time, to take it.

The concept of attestational dramaturgy is not meant to disqualify journalism as a whole. It is meant to make it legible, to name what would otherwise present itself as transparent obviousness. To name a device is to begin to be able to disengage from it. Emma Vinzent did this for herself, with a video of a few minutes. It is up to us to extend her gesture — not to condemn the profession, but to stop expecting from it what it can no longer, structurally, give us: simple and direct access to the truth of the world.

Appendix: full transcription of Emma Vinzent’s video

Video posted by Emma Vinzent on TikTok, discovered on 18 April 2026. Transcription established from the audio recording. Translated from French.

"This is how some media manipulate information. Emma Vincent, you’re at the Vienne tollgate. Exactly, we’re at the Vienne tollgate, just before Lyon, and things are already slowing down.

That’s me, but I’m not proud of it. I’m doing a live feed for TF1 about traffic jams, when there are obviously no traffic jams behind me. Why do journalists exaggerate all the time?

It’s an excellent question, and that’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about today. You know how important it is to understand our media, since they shape our vision of the world and of the news. So today, we’re going to talk a little about the system of correspondent journalists.

I was a regional correspondent for TF1 for three years, and their correspondent in India for one year. You’ll understand why I’m putting air quotes around that. When I was a correspondent in Lyon for TF1, I had to produce reports on news around Lyon for the 1pm and 8pm news.

But, a crucial detail, I wasn’t directly employed by TF1. In fact, TF1 contracts out production, to audio-visual production companies, to make almost all of its reports outside Paris — in the regions and abroad. Each production company is based in a different city — Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux — and they employ journalists like me who have to produce reports for TF1’s news bulletins.

These reports are then sold by the production company to TF1. TF1 pays about 2000 euros for a two-minute report. And this system obviously lets TF1 save tons of cash, since they don’t have to pay salaried employees in the regions.

They can just buy reports on a per-unit basis, when they think it’s worth it — when there’s a big news story, for example. But, there’s a “but”, it also creates a number of problems, mainly because of the competition it creates between production companies. Some reports — take the rise in petrol prices, for example — can technically be made anywhere in France.

So you have to pick which production company will do it. What happens then is that the editor-in-chief will call all the regional offices, saying, I want you to find me unhappy people at the pump, a petrol station manager, and it’s the first office that finds them who wins the right to do the report. And since the production companies have a monthly financial target to hit, otherwise their company goes under, journalists have no choice but to try to find exactly what the editor-in-chief asked for.

So, instead of having correspondents who report on what they observe in the field, we often have editors-in-chief who, from Paris, dictate what the report should look like. And that’s what sometimes pushes journalists to exaggerate what they see in the field, in order to sell one more story. So, on the one hand, there’s the question of TF1’s editorial line.

Yes, it’s a private channel, owned by Martin Bouygues, but it’s also important to look at its economic model — and besides, it’s an economic model that’s extremely widespread in TV channels, because that too is how some media manipulate information."