During the French 2007 presidential campaign, candidates and political parties, experts and citizens invested the Web. Mass media refined and sophisticated their online devices, while people, activists, experts, joining the trend of citizen journalism, developed online platforms of discussion and information and tried to break the routine and the codes of the campaign. It was time for an unmediated communication between society and politicians. Considering this configuration, should we conclude to a deep renewal of political communication? As pattern of deliberative communication in a shared public sphere is evolving toward a fragmented communication in multiple political arenas, should we see there the beginnings of a decline of the role of mass media for framing the public debate and for forming public opinion? This report deserves to be qualified, considering the results of an interdisciplinary multi-support study about the formation of political judgment. The analysis of a corpus of websites collected during the campaign, shows, first, that mass media’s portals remain the most usual way and the best access points to reach political information. Political blogs or participative platforms indeed enlarged the contents provided by mainstream media. All these devices share, to various degrees, a frame of construction of public opinion through debate and exchange of points of view. Quite different is the model of “opportunistic websites” of which emergence we observed. They aggregate political information from different sources and organize it in order to facilitate measure and comparisons; they collect and aggregate the traces of activities of Internet users in order to produce an “average opinion” supposed to be representative. Thus, in the forming of opinions, pattern of deliberative democracy competes with model of market rationality; political arenas are changed into digital marketplaces where political supply meets demand. The ideal of enlightened citizen has become a dream of warned consumer.
