Les nouveaux chiens de garde

This is a documentary based on the essay about corporate control over the french media of the same name by serge halimi, and named after paul nizan's essays against the 1930's liberal public philosophers advocating for the status-quo. Taking on the french media on its collusion with both the political and business world in ways rarely disclosed, through the cherrypicking of what constitutes the news an undisclosed political statement in the person of "the expert", whose ties to the capital are/were kept untold. Being right my alley when it comes to criticism of political and economic dogmatism, I'm unsure how accessible the description of the situation is when they start going into the concrete examples of mis-coverage of political crisis, but most of the context of the movie is made from common sense examples, and present casestudies known of the french general public, linking the pieces together. in the end of the movie, they ask how long will it take to separate capitalism and the media, but in this review I'll ask how long till this documentary is being shown in schools ?

The new watchdogs - a documentary about the very, very.. very close and personal ties of the French "independent, pluralist and objective" media with the academic, political, and corporate financial sector - crucial for understanding the mechanisms behind the reproduction of the dominant belief system and why a change of paradigm is.. a challenge..

Since Bourdieu and co, media criticism is almost a trivial exercise, but this film gives it a massive boost. In a fast paced style, and with entertaining "special effects", Gilles Balbastre and Yannick Kergoat dig into the archives of the French media landscape and demonstrate the complicity of the ruling classes in manipulating the public - send shivers down your spine!