This article reports on a three-month survey on viewers of public-service TV. Letters concerning programming, sent by these viewers to France T?l?visions, reveal a public motivated by civil rather than intellectual and cultural demands and torn by the violent conflicts and divisions tormenting today's societies. Racism, anti-Semitism and political equity are at the heart of the concerns expressed. This public also seems to mark some distance, even indifference, regarding the founding values of public-service television that still inspire the discourse of the powers that be. Likewise, concerns repeatedly expressed in the public sphere about the violence and pornography on our screens hardly touch the sensitivity of these informed protestors. The mediation of public-sector television, in which the cultural divide between the elite and the man in the street is recorded - bearing witness to social divides, especially inter-ethnic ones -, reflects an image of its public that is both comforting and worrying.