How do some large-scale adverse events receive major media coverage and become crises for public actors while others are treated as routine events? This article reinvestigates this question based on a case study of the media treatment in France of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents. Drawing on an original set of media data and an ethnographic study, the article shows how both accidents were subject to forms of opacity that limit their effects on nuclear institutions: Chernobyl has been treated through secrecy that leads to contestation of nuclear institutions, whereas Fukushima has been characterized by “public containment,” relying on extensive publication but low-priority and uncontroversial narratives that do not reflect the stakes of a given policy field. This paper explains the role of Fukushima in France through institutional transformations that public actors engaged in following Chernobyl to reestablish the credibility of public information sources and to monitor public debates over nuclear accidents by developing “hybrid” spaces, located at the interface of organizational frontstages and backstages. This case shows how responding to transparency demands may sometimes create new forms of opacity by reducing the epistemic quality of public debates while containing political crises.

中文翻译：

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从保密到公共遏制：混合空间在法国核危机治理中的作用

一些大规模的不良事件如何获得主要媒体的报道并成为公共行为者的危机，而另一些则被视为常规事件？本文基于法国媒体处理切尔诺贝利和福岛核事故的案例研究重新调查了这个问题。文章利用一组原始媒体数据和一项人种学研究，展示了这两起事故如何受到限制其对核机构影响的不透明形式的影响：切尔诺贝利通过保密处理，导致核机构的争议，而福岛事故以“公共遏制”为特征，依赖于广泛的出版物，但不反映特定政策领域的利害关系的低优先级和无争议的叙述。本文解释了福岛在法国的作用，通过公共行为者在切尔诺贝利事故之后参与的制度转型，以重建公共信息来源的可信度，并通过开发“混合”空间来监督公众对核事故的辩论，该空间位于组织前台和后台。这个案例表明，在遏制政治危机的同时，对透明度要求的回应有时会通过降低公共辩论的认知质量来创造新的不透明形式。