The importance given to the so-called Shanghai ranking invites to examine the discursive characteristics of its media coverage in France. This article examines the use of the concessive movement in the case of its media coverage. The media coverage analysis, based on more than one million hits press corpora, made it possible to objectify one of the salient dicursive features of its diffusion: the importance of the concession which neutralizes counter-discours. In a context of reforms in higher education and research and discourse on evaluation and academic excellence, the analysis of the press dicourse showed that the concessive movement has contributed to the dissemination of this instrument of judgment and its naturalization.