The emergence of « opportunist » websites during the french presidential campaign : the citizens give the way to the consumers

In 2007, during the last presidential campaign in France, - about which most observers said that it was the first one to take really into account the Internet media, the main candidates and the political parties, the experts and the citizens invested the Web. The analysis of the Web coverage of this campaign, brings to light this profusion and the constitution of nebulas of websites. <br />The traditional medias refined and sophisticated their devices by adapting the structure of the contents to the electoral terms ; at the same time, blogs and Web political or satiric TV, recently created and joining the trend of a critical journalism or a citizen journalism, tried to find the access in the "historic" media and to break the routine and the codes of the campaign by proposing exclusive and unpublished contents.<br />While citizens, activists, experts, developed online spaces of discussion and information, in the broadcasted medias, the journalists were confined to their presenters' role, and finally faded : it was time for a "short" circuit.<br />During this political campaign, we saw the confrontation of candidates looking for a direct contact with the people, vowing to free themselves from political parties and from medias, inviting us to be the witnesses of an authentic relation.<br /><br />Regarding these new configurations in the field of information, should we conclude to a deep renewal of the political communication and of the public debate ? Should we see there, the beginnings of a decline of the role of the medias in the forming of the public sphere ?<br /> <br />This report deserves to be qualified. The media's websites and the portals indeed remain the most usual way and the best access points to reach political information. This confirms a phenomenon of concentration of on-line audience that was already observed. The new political blogs or participative platforms in fact, come in addition to the traditional on-line medias. The questions are rather concerning the way these various devices articulate themselves, their visibility on the network and their capacity to weight on the agenda setting process. <br />Finally, these devices share, to various degrees, a frame of construction of the public opinion by the debate and the exchange of points of view.<br />Quite different is the model proposed by the opportunist websites, the emergence of which we observed during this campaign. They replace the face of the enlightened citizen by the one of the warned consumer. It is the point that we would want to emphasize in this paper.<br /><br />This study is based on a corpus of websites set up by medias, candidates, political parties, and on interactive platforms and blogs. They were collected from January to June 2007, as a part of an interdisciplinary multi-support study concerning the formation of the political opinion