2.1.2.2 Stakes related to
the public opinion
As in an arena, the field of the public opinion gathers
various actors carrying specific interests, even antagonistic.
The politicians, whose vocation is the conquest and the
democratic exercise of the capacity, seek to obtain the adhesion of the
citizens around their program, if not their person. Within this framework, they
are based on the majority of the other components of public space, under the
angle of the political communication. Indeed, the surveys are used for a
better knowledge of the reality of the reports/ratios of force than the
specialists and agencies of communication must make favorable to their
customers. With this intention, the leaders of opinion and the media are
canvassed. The latter seem element and spaces of intermediation, of shaping,
even of « manufacture opinion » (Blondiaux 1998).
In the same way, the professionals of political space
(agencies of surveys or communication), as companies of provision of services,
insist on the importance, for the politician, of a knowledge of the dominant
tendency of the public opinion in order to work to have it on its side.
The media, as for them, benefit from the political activities,
of the events, crises and stakes which they are carrying, in order to garner
the maximum of audience which makes their notoriety and conditions the
confidence of the advertisers, sources of their principal incomes.
The diversity of the actors to the specific but interdependent
interests makes public space an ambivalent place where handling and
argumentation, conditioning and confrontation, economic logic and to be able
stake coexist.
Between the intervals of each one of these couples, the
seduction occupies a dominating place.
| 
