Andrei Bastunets Speaks in Editors’ Club

Andrei Bas­tunets says that the pro­gram was broad­cast almost unabridged. The pro­gram was record­ed on Feb­ru­ary 26. “What we dis­cussed in the stu­dio was put on air”, he said to naviny.by.

Prac­ti­cal­ly noth­ing was cut out in edit­ing, the record­ing last­ed around five min­utes longer than the final pro­gram.

The atmos­phere in the Edi­tors’ Club was quite calm. “To tell the truth, I had expect­ed a tougher dis­cus­sion, but in fact there was a nor­mal talk at one table,” says the chair­per­son of BAJ.

The col­lo­cu­tors dis­cussed the issues before and after the pro­gram in the same man­ner that was shown in the pro­gram, says Bas­tunets. He regrets that the for­mat of the pro­gram does not allow dis­cussing the whole bunch of issues in the mass media sphere, so, they man­aged to touch upon some burn­ing issues of the last sev­er­al weeks – the beat­ing of the cor­re­spon­dent of TUT.by por­tal Pavel Dabravol­s­ki.

Andrei Bas­tunets under­lined he would like to dis­cuss more in detail the mass media sit­u­a­tion, in par­tic­u­lar, the pros­e­cu­tion of free­lance jour­nal­ists, issues with dis­tri­b­u­tion of pint press, and legal reg­u­la­tion of the media sphere.

“Per­haps, this is not the right for­mat of the pro­gram to do it, so we touched upon only the most painful issue today,” he said.

Andrei Bas­tunets wasn’t invit­ed to any more pro­grams. “Henad Davy­dz­ka said he would prob­a­bly invite Mary­na Zolata­va (chief edi­tor of TUT.by) who also signed our joint appeal. We’ll see,” he said.

We remind that on Feb­ru­ary 12, Andrei Bas­tunets and sev­er­al edi­tors of non-state mass media request­ed air­time from the Belaru­sian TV and Radio Com­pa­ny to have their say about the cur­rent media sit­u­a­tion and jour­nal­ists’ rights.  The request was signed by Mary­na Zolata­va, chief edi­tor of TUT.by; Andrey Dynko, chief edi­tor of Nasha Niva news­pa­per, Svi­at­lana Kalink­i­na, edi­tor of Nar­o­d­naya Volya news­pa­per,Ali­ak­san­dr Staryke­vich, chief edi­tor of Sol­i­dar­i­ty online news­pa­per, and Andrei Bas­tunets, the chair­per­son of BAJ.