Kaciaf, Nicolas <br/><br/>
From the locker room to the headlines, from the headlines to the locker room 

 -  2013.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 8 
<br/><br/> Do the media have the power to “create reality” from nothing? Or do they only “report” it, more or less faithfully, without interfering with it? A leading episode of the men’s soccer World Cup in South Africa, the “Anelka affair” highlighted the antagonism between these “hyper-constructivist” and “naturalistic” scenarios. Based on content analysis of the media combined with interviews with several actors in the controversy, this article aims to provide some theoretical means for analyzing a sequence initiated by the publication, on the front page of the daily L’Équipe, of insults uttered in the locker room of the French squad. The goal here is to show how the journalistic accounts are fully part of social “reality”: They are neither reflections not arbitrary constructions, but “fragments” of reality that, on the one hand, result from the dissemination of information conducted by sources positioned in a given configuration, and, on the other hand, are likely to have effects on the same configuration, causing others to react in public (via new statements) or inside the group (by searching for the person responsible for the leak). Then we try to offer a “continuous” analysis of the event dynamic, which examines together the prior and subsequent developments of media visibility. It implies, first, an examination of the specific logics of the actors who invest in the media arena, as “sources” or “protagonists” of the news. Second, it implies demonstrating that media publicity creates a dual impact, modifying the definition of the situation and causing a relative “desectorization” of the controversy.