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Talk:Mass media in Belarus

Latest comment: 7 months ago by ELindas in topic Major update 2024
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Major update 2024

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Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Following Dl2000's reversion of my edits I’ve rewritten the article, considering some criticism he gave, and to avoid any further misunderstandings I’ve prepared a complete explanation of my edits, section by section. Generally, the main drawback of this version was that it was drastically outdated and described Belarusian media landscape before the infamous presidential election of 2020, subsequent reprepressions against any kind of independent voices, vast closures of outlets, etc. Huge parts of the text looked simply copied from source No. 1 (Elena Kononova, EJC, 2010); as for me, not a top quality one. As much as possible, I tried to make the new text easy to read and give a general overview without diving too deep into the details, otherwise the article would get too huge.

Further step by step explanation of the edits:

1. Legislative framework Previous version included not only shameful examples of English like ‘the Закон Республики Беларусь "О средствах массовой информации" (Media Law of Belarus)’, but also relied heavily on source No. 1 and generally regarded the situation before 2020. I’ve introduced much more detailed info on how the Media Law of Belarus was restricted through the years and added good, not outdated sources, like this, this, and this. Regarding international obligations and treaties, Belarus has denounced almost all of them.

1b Regulatory authorities — all info from this section was merged to the previous one, apart from the mentioning of the Public Coordination Council in the sphere of mass media that is actually one of many of the entities in the structure of the Ministry of Information and has no really unique role to mention, otherwise it would be necessary to describe all the others, which would make the article unreadable (further described here). 1с Press accreditation One-paragraph section is too small, so this one I’ve also merged into the Legislative Framework section.

2. Censorship and media freedom It is a very big topic and has its own article, but of course it is absolutely necessary to characterize the media landscape as a whole. That is why I have added up-to-date information on ratings no older than 2021, so that it is illustrative in comparison with the situation in 2010. In the next paragraph, I named most of the journalists arrested for their work. I’ve removed this link because the old text of the article does not refer specifically to the murder of Oleg Bebenin, this reference is given only as confirmation of the constant harassment of journalists. The fact of harassment is sufficiently confirmed by the sources I have introduced like 1, 2, 3, etc. Bebenin’s case, I believe, deserves proper coverage in a separate article + in Censorship in Belarus.

3. Outlets Renamed in ‘Media landscape’. Intro to this section dated 2009, so I updated it with 2023 figures. The second paragraph, the big one, relied exclusively on a 2015 Freedom House report, but the link no longer works and the report is no longer available online, so I replaced it with a global report from the same year. I then named the largest national media outlets, which will be described further in subsections, added information on the language situation, and added quotes from the former Pluralism section. I made the heading "Issues" a first-level heading, adding the following:

3a. Agencies — the info on nine agencies in Belarus is vastly outdated (Kononova 2010 again and 2015 data from Belarus.by). I’ve slightly condensed the text on the situation for 2015, highlighting the largest of the agencies, and expanded the data for 2023, additionally describing how the two most important independent agencies were closed.

3b. Print media — again, here the figures were as of 2009, I’ve added current figures. I think that the full list of editions should be kept in the subject article, while Mass media in Belarus should present more of the current picture as a whole. In the first paragraph, the text just listed the names of the newspapers and the circulations, grouped together without any common ground: Novy Chas, Nasha Niva, Nasha Niva, that all are currently banned by the Belarusian authorities and/or declared extremist, were followed by Holas Radzimy, a state-run newspaper for the Belarusian diaspora abroad. Then, there was no ref to the source at the end of the paragraph. The second and third paragraphs had the same picture - again there was a mixed-up listing of defunct (for example, Intex-Press) and working editions, some of them had changed its course completely, for instance, Narodnaja Volia was described as ‘pro-opposition newspaper on politics’, however, in 2023 editor-in-chief Iosif Seredić has resigned, and under the new editor-in-chief, the publication completely changed its course and rhetoric to pro-government propaganda. Again, in these paragraphs, links to official websites were used as refs. I’ve rewritten the text, grouping the publications by state-run and independent, mentioning the closed ones, etc.

3c. Publishing houses — the short section, I’ve added info on some independent publishers and expanded the text about the state-run ones. I’ve removed the sentence about Romm publishing house, as I find it irrelevant to the modern media landscape.

3d. Radio — in its original form, it was a very problematic section, merely a listing of radio stations with no proper references (paragraphs 2, 3, 4) or none at all (5, 8), poor punctuation (no full stops, par. 2 and 5). As with print publications above, I believe this section should provide an overview rather than be a listing for there is a subject article. I’ve rewritten the section and grouped the stations that are still working into state-run, closed and exiled.

3e. Cinema — I left it as is. Although I don't think the text in this section is relevant to the article, I don't know how it could be improved.

3f. TV — again, the figures were taken from 2009, the text was a simple listing of channels with references to themselves. In the biggest 3rd paragraph there were no references at all. In my version, I briefly described the structure of Belarusian television and its peculiarities, listed the channels with operators, etc.

4. Media ownership and pluralism — this section I’ve disintegrated and reintroduced into other sections, such as Outlets, Media landscape, and Legal framework, because in its previous categorization just didn’t work: explanations about state monopoly in the media is given above, foreign media is banned, private do not exist anymore, as I’ve explained and confirmed previously.

5. Transparency of media ownership — I deleted the section as it was empty. And the fact is that the situation is actually very transparent, the media is owned by the state, and this was mentioned many times in the article.

6. Unions and organizations — that was a short section, also based on 2010 Kononova source. I’ve expanded the section with more detailed info about BAJ and BUJ, confirmed with good sources.—ELindas (talk) 18:24, 19 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Language Barrier?

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Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I came here because this page is flagged for copy editing, and I've noticed that the titles of many legal documents referenced here appear to be in Belarusian. Before I make any major changes, I was wondering if this is an issue. Previous authors appear to have included translations in parentheses, but looking at the punctuation in some of the original Belarusian it does not appear to match up to a direct translation.

Tordenofitami (talk) 00:03, 19 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

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Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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