La modification des pratiques journalistiques et du contenu des nouvelles télévisées, du quotidien à la situation de crise : analyse France/Québec

This thesis focuses on the news coverage during abrupt and unexpected events, due to "a very difficult situation, even dangerous, for an individual, an organization, a social body, an economic system or a country"  and aims to determine in what ways journalistic practices and media contents in a crisis situation differ from ordinary daily practices. The assumption on which this thesis rests is that in a crisis situation, journalistic practices will be affected by emotions, the spur of the moment and the search for exclusivity. Regarding content, there will be saturation of certain issues related to the crisis, while many daily topics will be removed and the risk of errors or inaccuracies will be exacerbated. This doctoral work follows the path of a comparison between France and Quebec, as both countries share a language and similar TV channel structure, which allows us to establish valid comparison bases. To answer the question of the research, a triple methodological strategy was adopted and the results of these analyses are presented in subsequent chapters of the thesis. First are presented the results of semi-structured interviews we conducted, in the form of professional life stories, with different actors from the information sector. These are followed by the results of a quantitative content analysis of television news which is based on a corpus formed of reports presented during three types of crises in France and in Quebec: "social" crises, "natural" crises and "mixed" crises. These reports were submitted to the grid analysis from George Gerbner’s project "Television Around the World". Finally, a content analysis of 1,676 decisions from the jurisprudence of the Quebec Press Council was conducted. This analysis offered the opportunity to examine a certain amount of complaints relating to crisis situations, to observe the objections raised in these complaints and to analyze the different trends with respect to the complainants, the respondents and the decisions of the Quebec media self-regulatory body. The complexity of the definition and understanding of crises results from these various analyzes and poses many challenges to the news professionals who regularly face this type of situations, since they play a major role in media programming.  In the two countries analyzed, crisis coverage is presented in a very self centric way, while the main elements that attract the attention of journalists are those related to their country of origin. Nevertheless, the choice of themes and the angle of treatment are quite similar from one country to another and journalists tend to focus on the same issues and to put forward the same type of elements in the situations we observed. There are therefore very clear practices that appear when it comes to address crises in the media. By identifying these, this thesis lays the foundations of a critical reflection on the place made to crises in the information world and reveals an insufficient number of ethical tools essential to the work of journalists as well as a lack of reflection and perspective on the emphasis given to some topics in the news.

Keyphrases: Crise, Journalistic practices, Communication, Content analysis, Journalism, Cultivation theory, Crisis, War, Quebec Press Council, Journalistic ethics, Social crises, Natural disasters