Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-05
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Érik Neveu, Sociologist, University of Rennes 1 – University of Rennes
The “problems” highlighted by the media or political leaders are not necessarily the most urgent or essential. Understanding how “public problems” emerge invites us not to consider them as self-evident. What actions and contexts propel an issue onto the public stage or suppress it?
The expression “public problem” does not yet belong to common vocabulary. It designates a process: how does a fact, a theme, become the object of attention from the media, conversations, and possibly public policies?
If we are talking about it, then the matter is important! Here, things get complicated. To state a paradoxical proposition: there is no logical correspondence rule between what would be the objective severity of an event or an issue — which is not always easy to rank, by the way — and its transformation into a public problem.
Situations that can be argued to have caused immense suffering to large groups have long remained under the radar of public debates and action. Consider sexual violence against women or children, the sometimes pitiful situation of elderly people in nursing homes, their frequent loneliness… An issue recently addressed by the government ofSouth Korea, to the surprise of commentators. Conversely, margarine will appear as a rather unclean object to unleash passions… Yet it has sparked fierce debates, and even a series of referendums on its ban, the obligation to color it pink at the end of the 19th century in the United States! And it is not certain that the emotions aroused in France by a few dozenwomen bathing in burkinisdo not seem so strange in twenty years.
Cause entrepreneurs
Facts and events are not ventriloquists. They need the equivalent of impresarios: these are the cause entrepreneurs. This term designates a wide variety of actors (associations, intellectuals, social movements, pressure groups, companies, elected officials and parties, administrations, journalists) who define situations as “problematic,” that is, requiring attention, debate, and action. Their action aims to propel issues towards the public arena and political authorities. The forms of this vary according to the resources and the nature of the entrepreneurs. It can involve a long investigative work by a journalist, as was done byVictor Castagnet on abuse in Orpea group nursing homes.Social movements will increasingly resort to mobilizations, as illustrated by the challenge to the “mega-basins” created at the request of agricultural unions who are able to convince local authorities that irrigation is a public issue.
But activists can also face a job ofdisqualification of their approaches or their arguments. Thus, whenNestlé argues, against consumer associations, that even when treated in violation of standards, its waters are perfectly “mineral”.. They may see their file channeled towards institutions that prevent its public exposure, bogged down in extremely slow procedures, like the victims ofchlordecone in the Antilles.
The emergence of a public issue is always the result of a double struggle. It pits competing causes against each other because attention is a scarce resource. Even in times of informational abundance, it is necessary to prioritize the topics that make the headlines. The parliamentary agenda does not allow for legislation on everything simultaneously. When on November 22, 2025, rallies are held against violence toward women, others for the rights of Palestinians, others in tribute toMehdi Kessacikilled by drug traffickers, what will be the headline of radio and television newspapers?
The struggle also concerns what are called media and political “framings” – the photographic metaphor referring to what is made visible or pushed outside the frame. When debating drug trafficking, should one, as was doneBruno Retailleau, point the responsibility towards consumers or consider the use of cannabis as such a trivialized fact that it is better to legalize it? Should public policy responses focus on the deal points or on a banking system still too permeable to dirty money?
Narrate
It is necessary both to make visible and to “make clearly visible” what one wants to constitute as a problem. It is therefore skillful to mobilize elements of a shared culture, to take into account an ideological zeitgeist.
If theMargarine became a public problem in Gilded Age America, is that these small bars of fatty substance condensed a whole set of oppositions. An “authentic” product, butter symbolized a rural America of small producers with sober customs, close to nature. A by-product of Chicago slaughterhouses, margarine embodied, on the other hand, the big city, the rise of industry and “artificial” or adulterated products; it was consumed by a proletariat often coming from Latin and/or Catholic countries, supposed to be intemperate, stigmatized by the “nativism” of Protestant Americans who considered themselves more authentic because born on Union soil.
Also to read:
Margarine vs butter: how what we spread on our toast became a weapon of class war
To promote a problem is also to make it a story — in the double sense of this expression. To suggest its seriousness, the urgency to respond to it, therefore. This is argued through three main rhetorical registers. Expertise through reports, figures, and consultations with practitioners and researchers. Thevoice of the peoplewhich will show — through polls, numbers of protesters, election results — how much “the French” are concerned, requesting certain actions. The appeal to emotions, finally, will operate on a keyboard where fear, shame, compassion, resentment, hatred play.
Brought into debate in the 1970s following the deaths of workers in factories producing brake pads, the asbestos issue then aroused indignation and compassion, but it was quickly overshadowed by other tragedies.Reframed in the 1990sas an omnipresent environmental pollutant (from building materials to toasters), associated, on TF1’s news broadcast, with the skull-and-crossbones poison logo, this time threatening everyone, asbestos then mobilizes a fear with a range and duration of impact that are much more effective.
The best narrative, the most well-argued, is only effective if it fits into three “agendas”: the hierarchy of attention of the media, public opinion, and political decision-makers. However, the resources of cause advocates in financial means, mastery of media logic, access to elected officials, and ministerial offices are very unequal. The media operate as problem filters according to what is called their“informational value”.
If environmental issues are now quite significantly covered, they took a long time to find their place. Ecologists appeared too militant, antimodern, even “amish“”, thus seen as unreliable sources. Even more, the absence of an adequate “section” and therefore of specialized journalists raised the question: where to talk about toxic discharges from a factory, the decline of butterflies? In news reports, economy, sciences?The answer was often: nowhere.
Talking about inequalities among entrepreneurs also means noting that some demands or problems can be heard without going through the “media” stage – when their supporters are connected to centers of decision-making, they have the resources for discreet and effective lobbying. In a very well-documented study of pressure groups in Brussels,Sylvain Laurenshas been able to show that, besides the actions of thousands of professional lobbyists, they often had, within the general directorates of the European Commission, real garrisons of former employees and collaborators.
From public problems to public policies
The success of problem entrepreneurs can be measured by their ability to influence public policies, to have new ones instituted.
That a Ministry of Culture could promote rock or comics, that another ministry could deal with women’s rights, was not a given half a century ago. But the passing of a law, the creation of an administration responding to a problem, are rarely the equivalent of an “arrival” box.
The victory of some prompts the remobilization of those defeated (for example,the abandonment of low-emission zones, LEZs, when they were accused of excluding the poorest cities). The agents of an administration can, on the ground, cause the scope of a reform to deviate. This reform may prove to be dysfunctional or ruinous (see the difficult implementation ofMaPrimeRénov’ on building insulation).
The response to a problem can create others – as shown by the researcher in the United StatesChin Jou, the aids of theSmall Business Administrationto African American entrepreneurs finance the invasion of black neighborhoods by fast food junk food. The trajectory of public problems has this in common with walking on a game of goose that one can take shortcuts, move very quickly, but also suddenly return to the “Start” square.
Coming from American social sciences and notably from the works ofJoseph Gusfield, the analysis of public problems has established itself over the past thirty years in the French academic world. It is enlightening for citizens by inviting them tonot to think of objects of public debate as self-evident. It helps to understand — without conspiratorial shortcuts — the actions and contexts that propel or push back an issue on the media and political stages, and shape its terms.
Érik Neveu is the author of Political sociology of public problems,Armand Colin, Paris, 2022, 2nd ed.
Érik Neveu does not work for, advise, hold shares in, or receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than his research institute.
–ref. How do the “problems” spoken about by media and politicians emerge? –https://theconversation.com/how-do-problems-discussed-by-media-and-politicians-emerge-271570