Abstract EN:

Taking into consideration many armed robberies, rapes, theft and homicides recorded in many suburbs of big Cameroonian agglomerations, violence known as “urban” appear limited and sporadical in France and are more due to delinquency and incivility than to crime. The same word does not have the same meaning here and in Cameroon of the comparable facts; here and there, these facts are however at the origin of equal and intense setting in media scene. It is on this building work of the representations by the activity of the Cameroonian national daily journalists that our research is based. The ordinary daily violence will not be evoked here, but if it is done, it will only be in an indirect and summary way. Our Objective is different. It is a question, first of all, of examining the changes occurred on the level of the journalistic practices, in bond with those which touch the general terms of construction of the public debate and democratic dynamics. Then after it’s a question of examining the new statute of “violence” as a stake of the media debate, and the manner by which journalism adapts this stake, to a broad public. The parallelization (more than the comparison strictly speaking) of the situations Cameroonian and French is suggestive of the same general evolution at a time when our communities become mass democracies. Of this last term, two principal meanings are to be retained: on one side, that which relates to the importance acquired by information “of mass”, standardized and intended for a very large audience; but on the other side, that which relates effects and social actors on the political life, of which one of the major translations is the rise to power of their double slackness and caricatural, “the public opinion”. Instead of being the vectors of an autonomous direction conveyed by the social actors of the public debate, the journalists are often thorough to take the initiative on a public with the unspecified social profile, seized in its dimensions of passivity and fear. In France as in Cameroon, the entry in force of “urban violence’s” in media space was carried out in connection with a crisis situation thus defined: whereas actors and social movements withdrew from the public stage, to be maintained there often only in one minor and degraded form, the journalistic practices were becoming “professional”, the technical base constitutive of media space widened, its logics of operation becoming increasingly dependent on the constraints of format. In spite of these common general tendencies, the mediatization of violence in Cameroon and in France corresponds to two distinct ideal types: that of culture, in the case of Cameroon; that of the Jacobinism, in the case of France. The main tendencies which mark the evolution of journalism and the national press do not differ to a significant degree from one place to another, even if this evolution is carried out according to heterogeneous temporalities. The Cameroonian case is interesting, insofar as an important inflection of the journalistic practices, in the years 1990, coincides with the return to democracy, defined by a new law on social communication but also, as much, by the end of censorship and the liberalization of the Cameroonian media space. In France, the meeting of these logics, professional and sociopolitic is more outstanding. But it did not become less visible in the years 1980, and especially in 2000; during the riots of Clichy-sous-Bois of 2005 when the children of immigrants were projected in the public life using a setting of spectacular scenes of violence.