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  • What’s really behind “bundling of regional editorial offices” announced by Ministry of Information?

    This week, the Ministry of Information stated the need for bundling regional newspapers. It is justified by the “difficulty to attract expensive specialists” to the provinces. However, it looks like another stage of degradation of the state print press and an attempt to save funds, most of which are now directed to the TV propaganda apparatus. The Belarusian Association of Journalists investigated the issue.

    Optimization on paper – cuts in reality

    In its Telegram chan­nel, the Min­istry seems con­vinced of the need to stim­u­late edi­to­r­i­al offices in the provinces: “The prin­ci­pal edi­to­r­i­al offices of the hold­ing will take over the func­tions and tasks that region­al edi­to­r­i­al offices can­not assume or mas­ter effec­tive­ly: Inter­net, social media, design, mod­ern lay­out”.

    Accord­ing to offi­cials, “it is dif­fi­cult to attract expen­sive spe­cial­ists – SMM work­ers, PR spe­cial­ists, design­ers, artists – to the provinces,” and “the work must be trans­ferred to the prin­ci­pal edi­to­r­i­al office of the hold­ing”.

    If trans­lat­ed from the offi­cial lan­guage, it means trans­fer­ring cer­tain tasks from the print press to some joint cen­ters, which will deal with the design and dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent. The tone of the mes­sage seems to jus­ti­fy the unpop­u­lar deci­sion for a rea­son. In fact, edi­to­r­i­al offices will lose some of their staff (lay­out design­ers, SMM staff, etc.), while the state will be able to save mon­ey.

    Sim­i­lar process­es in the state press sys­tem result­ed in the pre­vi­ous­ly large pub­li­ca­tions’ loss of agency and depen­dence on for­mer com­peti­tors who gained access to addi­tion­al resources.

    Now the “trans­for­ma­tion” has descend­ed to a low­er lev­el, from the nation­al to the region­al press.

    This assump­tion is sup­port­ed by finan­cial plans: this year, the state bud­get fore­casts spend­ing 64.4 mil­lion US dol­lars on state-run media, with just $3.6 mil­lion allo­cat­ed to the print media. A huge piece of the pie goes to tele­vi­sion and radio – $52.8 mil­lion. The rest will be spent on “oth­er” media (state-run Telegram chan­nels and affil­i­at­ed vlog­gers). 

    What does this mean? In the eyes of the author­i­ties, the state-owned print media are los­ing influ­ence, and a pre­mi­um is placed on tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions dom­i­nat­ed by pro­pa­gan­dist shows.

    Thus, the Nation­al State TV and Radio Com­pa­ny is to receive $47.7 mil­lion, the Mir TV and Radio Com­pa­ny – $3.8 mil­lion, and the Sec­ond Nation­al TV Chan­nel – $1.8 mil­lion.

    Inter­est­ing­ly, the STV chan­nel will get almost five times more funds than in 2022 ($1.5 mil­lion). This is the best evi­dence of how the “enthu­si­asm” of regime pro­mot­ers Ryhor Azaron­ak, Yauhen Pus­tavy, and Ali­ak­sei Dzer­mant is assessed.

    It should also be not­ed that the state print press is not the only sec­tor affect­ed by the “opti­miza­tion”. While at the end of last year the num­ber of news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, and almanacs reg­is­tered with the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion made around 1200, now there are only 963 print media, of which 403 are state-owned and 560 are pri­vate.

    This hap­pened against the back­ground of impos­ing polit­i­cal cen­sor­ship on inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers, such as Nar­o­d­naya Volya, Svo­bod­nye novosti plus, Novy chas, Bel­Gaze­ta, Kom­so­mol­skaya prav­da v Belarusi, and Belorusy i rynok.

    Who is entitled to complain about “pessimisation”?

    How­ev­er, the degra­da­tion of the sys­tem of both state and non-state press is of no con­cern for Infor­ma­tion Min­is­ter Uladz­imir Piart­sou who recent­ly com­plained about the “pes­simi­sa­tion of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion by Amer­i­can spe­cial ser­vices.”

    “In 2020, ‘true’ [the Min­istry of Information’s Telegram chan­nel delib­er­ate­ly scare-quot­ed the word – Author’s note] media used dig­i­tal plat­forms to evoke cer­tain emo­tions in peo­ple,” the offi­cial said. “But such syn­thet­ic emo­tions quick­ly arise and as quick­ly fade away – that’s the mechan­ics. This lev­el of con­fronta­tion, hybrid media influ­ence, and the grow­ing mil­i­tary threat across the perime­ter of our coun­try warns us that the next bat­tle will not be as soft as in 2020.”

    The reg­u­lat­ing author­i­ties’ dreams to take con­trol of the infor­ma­tion space have long extend­ed to social media and mes­sen­gers.

    Last fall at the so-called Young Jour­nal­ists’ Forum in Hrod­na, Piart­sou called for social media and mes­sen­gers to obtain legal sta­tus in the coun­try of their oper­a­tion.

    “To begin with, we need to have them ‘land’ in our coun­try: start an office, reg­is­ter a legal address, and be phys­i­cal­ly present with peo­ple who con­duct busi­ness activ­i­ties and with whom one can nego­ti­ate. Cur­rent­ly, we do not have such social media. How­ev­er, pub­lic and pri­vate nego­ti­a­tions are con­duct­ed with many mar­ket play­ers,” he said.

    The author­i­ties are prob­a­bly well aware that shut­ting down “extrem­ist resources” is a pal­lia­tive that the user can eas­i­ly bypass if nec­es­sary, with­out leav­ing much of a dig­i­tal foot­print. What would accom­mo­date the state to a larg­er extent is the pos­si­bil­i­ty to direct­ly influ­ence the own­ers of social media and mes­sen­gers and remove unde­sired con­tent bypass­ing local rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

    In fact, it is the inde­pen­dent media that should real­ly com­plain about “pes­simi­sa­tion”. Most of them were declared extrem­ist, the edi­to­r­i­al offices were forced to relo­cate to oth­er coun­tries, and over 400 jour­nal­ists have to work abroad.

    Block­ing inde­pen­dent media sites in Belarus caus­es the Google search engine to push them down in search results, while pro­pa­gan­da pub­li­ca­tions appear much high­er. This issue has been repeat­ed­ly raised in cor­re­spon­dence with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Amer­i­can com­pa­ny but has not yet been solved.

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