"France is scared! The summer of 2023 has plunged the country into a climate of anxiety... and stinging. Infestation, escalation, stupor, psychosis - then sudden disappearance of the subject. But what happened?
Perhaps not since Orson Welles' War of the Worlds has there been such a collective psychosis. In the midst of a relative media torpor, the subject that would make the headlines at the turn of the summer 2023 suddenly emerged. Take the test: type "disinfect", "protect", "eradicate" or "why" into the Google search bar, and the suggestion will have something to do with these troublesome intruders that seem to have supplanted Asian hornets and other processionary caterpillars as the most invasive species. Despite the absence of a media plan and (a priori) a communications consultancy, the bedbug obtained 25,000 press coverage between May and October 2023 (compared with barely 600 over the same period in 2022). Far more than COP28! The result is all the more impressive given that it was not linked to any particular news event (or, in our jargon, to a "fait générateur"), since the claims rate does not appear to have increased in 2023.
Note that we're not talking about a Franco-French syndrome here: the world's leading media (the New York Times, the Guardian, El Pais...) have taken an interest in this subject, which has undoubtedly contributed to the capital's international reputation (without costing the Parisian taxpayer a cent, it should be pointed out).
So much so, in fact, that the communicator is tempted to extract a few best practices from this sequence and, beyond its sanitary aspect, the "bedbug crisis" interests the philosopher as much as the entomologist (notably the excellent Gaspard Koenig, a rare synthesis of the two since his work on earthworms is now an authority). Once the subject had been wrung out, analyses of the media's treatment of bedbugs began to flourish - "meta-bug" reflections that could form the basis of a new branch of media sociology.
Here's a selection: according to Gaspard Koenig, who borrows the concept from Daniel Kahnemann, " our tendency to extrapolate this type of news item is explained by the 'availability heuristic', i.e. our mind's propensity to transform shocking images into general rules, in defiance of any rigorous probabilistic reasoning ". According to Jean Viard, " societies are always telling themselves tragic stories. Since we live in an ultra-mediatized world, we need one every three days to keep our interest ". The media are no slouches when it comes to stoking the fires of anxiety. For example, a relatively innocuous phrase taken out of context by Paris's first deputy mayor Emmanuel Grégoire (" no one is safe ") was repeated as a banner headline on all-news channels ... and then in an especially frightening English version in the international media: " No one is safe! "
But it's unquestionably the provocative title of an article in Marianne that best sums up this modern tragi-comic fable: " Course à l'info: le jour où le Hamas a éradiqué les punaises de lit " (" News race: the day Hamas eradicated bedbugs ").
Gabrielle Maes (Consultant) and Alexis de Maigret (Associate Director)
