The legislative elections made more noise in the media in 13 days than the presidential elections in 5 weeks

POLITICS – A media explosion. The express campaign for the legislative elections provoked a wave of articles, television and radio reports, and interviews in the media, to the point of making “the political-media event of the decade”estimates a study carried out by the Jean-Jaurès Foundation with the Onclusive institute published this Wednesday, June 26.

The gap is glaring: in comparison with the European elections of June 9, the legislative election campaign generated almost six times more content in the media over an equivalent period, notes the institute.

Even more telling, the current political sequence, marked by the unprecedented rise of the far right in French votes, has generated more media noise than the last two presidential elections.

Concretely, “the 2024 legislative elections generated in 13 days a media noise close to that caused by the presidential campaign in five weeks in 2022”, indicates the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. As you can see on the graph below, The legislative campaign has already generated 23,373 media noise units (MNU). For comparison, coverage of the World Cup in Qatar the same year generated 27,585 MNU.

228 newspaper front pages dedicated to the legislative elections

“The French were caught by a tidal wave of information, the campaign being omnipresent, whatever their ways of obtaining information”, notes the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. This media explosion was notably seen on the front pages of the newspapers.

Since June 9, 228 press headline covers have been devoted to the legislative elections, almost half of which in the regional daily press. For example, the newspaper West France, leading written press title in France, mentioned the two rounds of the elections of June 30 and July 7 on its front page in six editions in the space of two weeks.

The French have also widely heard about the campaign on television: TF1’s 8 p.m. Journal devoted an average of 5 topics per day to the legislative elections between June 10 and 21, that of France 2 climbs to 7 topics on average per day .

Some media have also organized exceptional programs, such as Europe 1 and its daily show We walk on the headpresented by Cyril Hanouna. The Onclusive study notes, however, that one in two guests on Cyril Hanouna’s shows, whether on Europe 1 or on C8 with Do not touch My TV !, bears an extreme right label, as you can see below.

Another survey, published by Marianne on June 12, precisely underlined the consequences of the choice of television channel guests on the political opinions of viewers. According to this study, one in two viewers of Do not touch My TV ! voted for the far right (RN or Reconquest!) on June 9 for the European elections.

The Onclusive study focuses specifically on the period from June 9 to 21, 2024 and concerns 117 general media (TV, radio, press, web) such as France Inter, Europe 1, TF1, BFMTV, Cnews, Le Monde or Le HuffPost.

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