Two realities of one Silent Revolution

To find a dif­fer­ence in the nature of dis­course on the Rev­o­lu­tion through Social Net­works in major Belaru­sian state-run and inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers, this study looks at news sto­ries from four Belaru­sian news­pa­pers: Belarus Today, Respub­li­ka, Bel­Gaze­ta and Nar­o­d­naya Volya. A total of 72 news sto­ries that were pub­lished from June 8, 2011 to August 31, 2011 were exam­ined with the method of dis­course analy­sis.

Provoca­tive act or peace­ful ral­ly?

The Rev­o­lu­tion through Social Net­works, pro­test­ers, police forces and oth­er peo­ple were rep­re­sent­ed in the state-run and inde­pen­dent media dif­fer­ent­ly. Belarus Today and Respub­li­ka told about the Rev­o­lu­tion through Social Net­works most often as a provoca­tive act, a small group of peo­ple, an action orga­nized by West­ern coun­tries, and as a threat to the coun­try. Inde­pen­dent media, in its turn, rep­re­sent­ed the protests as a peace­ful ral­ly and an expres­sion of dis­con­tent. In June, some jour­nal­ists char­ac­ter­ized it as fun for peo­ple, but lat­er, after more peo­ple joined the ral­ly, and police began to inter­vene, this type of rep­re­sen­ta­tion was no longer applied. Two impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics of the protests rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the inde­pen­dent media were attempts to eval­u­ate it objec­tive­ly and place it into the socio-polit­i­cal con­text.

In the state-run media, pro­test­ers are pic­tured as young max­i­mal­ists, ini­tia­tors of dis­or­der, idlers, or peo­ple belong­ing to oppo­si­tion. Both Bel­Gaze­ta and Nar­o­d­naya Volya rep­re­sent­ed the par­tic­i­pants of the ral­lies as usu­al peo­ple and not belong­ing to oppo­si­tion. Most often pro­test­ers are described as edu­cat­ed youth. Lat­er, sev­er­al sto­ries appeared that described old­er peo­ple.

Police forces in the sto­ries pub­lished in the state-run out­lets are rep­re­sent­ed as a hand of jus­tice that reacts ade­quate­ly to the threat, and their actions are sim­i­lar to the world prac­tices. At the same time, reporters of the inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers wit­nessed the reac­tion of the police and described it as a harsh and not ade­quate to a threat. There are plen­ty of exam­ples of irra­tional­i­ty and deten­tions of acci­den­tal peo­ple.

Oth­er peo­ple pre­sent­ed in the news sto­ries are read­ers that express their opin­ion in let­ters, experts that dis­cuss the phe­nom­e­non, offi­cials and oth­er cit­i­zens. In the state-run news­pa­pers, all these actors are rep­re­sent­ed as talk­ing about the protests with antag­o­nism. In the inde­pen­dent out­lets, oth­er peo­ple are rep­re­sent­ed most often as being neu­tral to the pro­test­ers or sup­port­ing them.

How they select­ed facts

Both state-run and inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers used selec­tion and com­po­si­tion of facts. It was not­ed, how­ev­er, that the state-run media used these dis­cur­sive strate­gies most often glar­ing­ly. One of the demon­stra­tive exam­ples is the sto­ry “Trash from the Net” from Belarus Today about a teenage girl who was a neo-Nazi and com­mit­ted sui­cide. The author tells about the rea­sons of race hatred and how dan­ger­ous trends sim­i­lar to that one are dis­sem­i­nat­ed in the world via the Inter­net. Next, he tells about politi­cized youth that also uses the Inter­net for com­mu­ni­ca­tion. With the help of this “trans­fer” tech­nique the arti­cle puts the pro­test­ers into the posi­tion of alien­at­ed per­sons that rep­re­sent a threat to the coun­try. By empha­siz­ing the young age and small amount of pro­test­ers, state-run media sup­port­ed the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the event as some­thing imper­ma­nent and insignif­i­cant. This served to con­firm the vision of the sta­bil­i­ty in the coun­try – one of the main ide­o­log­i­cal stand­points char­ac­ter­is­tic for Belaru­sian state-run media.

De-legit­i­ma­tion and politi­ciza­tion of the event in the state-run media along with the appeal to the world prac­tices of deal­ing with protests serve as the excus­es for vio­lent sup­pres­sion of the pos­si­ble rev­o­lu­tion and, hence, “sav­ing” the coun­try.

Though inde­pen­dent media also applied de-legit­i­ma­tion dis­cur­sive strate­gies, they did it not towards the pro­test­ers, but towards the polit­i­cal order, police actions and vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion. They legit­imized the peace­ful ral­ly and the right of assem­bly. Report­ing about the dif­fer­ent cities of the coun­try and momen­tum of ral­lies showed the explic­it intent of the inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers to attach to it greater sig­nif­i­cance.

Major or minor event?

There were far more sto­ries about the Rev­o­lu­tion through Social Net­works in the inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers than in the state-run news­pa­pers (Fig­ure 1). For the inde­pen­dent media, the Rev­o­lu­tion through Social Net­works was a major event dis­cussed in almost every issue dur­ing that time. State-run news­pa­pers didn’t cov­er it so inten­sive­ly or sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly.

Fig­ure 1. Num­ber of news sto­ries depend­ing on the own­er­ship of the mass media

Dis­tri­b­u­tion of news sto­ries in time (Fig­ure 2) showed that the inde­pen­dent media fol­lowed the events and cov­ered them accord­ing to the growth and decrease of the num­ber of pro­test­ers and events relat­ed to it in the spe­cif­ic time. State-run news­pa­pers were cov­er­ing the event with the near­ly same inten­si­ty in June, July and August what con­firms the sug­ges­tion about the acci­den­tal and non-sys­tem­at­ic cov­er­age.

Fig­ure 2. Dis­tri­b­u­tion of news sto­ries in time

Silenced voic­es of the Silent Rev­o­lu­tion

State-run media nev­er allowed par­tic­i­pants of the ral­ly to speak on their pages (Table 1). This, along with the absence of quotes from the police and sig­nif­i­cant­ly small amount of opin­ions of experts or read­ers and at the same time a lot of pub­lished speech­es of the pres­i­dent allow eval­u­at­ing the cov­er­age as pro-gov­ern­men­tal and fail­ing to present vari­ety of per­spec­tives on the issue.

Inde­pen­dent media used oth­er people/witnesses and protesters/participants most often as their sources. Also, offi­cials and police­men are cit­ed fre­quent­ly in both news­pa­pers. The small amount of the pub­lished let­ters of the read­ers could be explained by the fact that not all news­pa­pers use the prac­tice of pub­lish­ing let­ters wide­ly. In this case, all four let­ters were pub­lished in Nar­o­d­naya Volya. This lack of read­ers’ opin­ion could be con­sid­ered accept­able though because both news­pa­pers gave cita­tions of wit­ness­es of the ral­lies from the streets very often. In that way, it could be admit­ted that they dis­trib­uted right to speak to their sources rather fair­ly.

Table 1. Voiced pre­sent­ed in the news sto­ries by two types of mass media

So, what do we have?

Manip­u­la­tion of facts and acci­den­tal cov­er­age of the event cre­at­ed the illog­ic in the way the phe­nom­e­non is rep­re­sent­ed in the state-run news­pa­pers. On the one hand, the protests are pic­tured as a provoca­tive act and threat to the coun­try; on the oth­er hand, the ral­lies are char­ac­ter­ized as a ‘mob’ with small amount of par­tic­i­pants. These char­ac­ter­is­tics of the ral­lies as imper­ma­nent and insignif­i­cant served to sup­port the image of sta­bil­i­ty in the coun­try – one of the main stand­points of the state ide­ol­o­gy in Belarus. The state-run news­pa­pers cov­ered the event occa­sion­al­ly and explic­it­ly favored pro-gov­ern­men­tal per­spec­tive. In the arti­cles, anti-oppo­si­tion­al and anti-rev­o­lu­tion­ary ide­o­log­i­cal stand­points were wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed.

The inde­pen­dent media cov­ered the event more sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, pre­sent­ed diver­si­ty of sources and made attempts to eval­u­ate the phe­nom­e­non and its strengths and weak­ness­es. At the same time, though sev­er­al arti­cles men­tioned the momen­tum of the ral­ly, there were no explic­it eval­u­a­tions of the num­bers com­pared to the pop­u­la­tion of cities or the coun­try in gen­er­al. The most impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the dis­course was a sys­tem­at­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of pro­test­ers as usu­al peo­ple, not oppo­si­tion forces or polit­i­cal par­ties. Still, some aspects of the cov­er­age, such as attach­ing excess of ide­al­ized char­ac­ter­is­tics to the pro­test­ers and appeal­ing to emo­tions could have influ­enced the unbi­ased cov­er­age of the event.

Copy­right­ed © mate­r­i­al. No part of this arti­cle may be pub­lished, dis­trib­uted, extract­ed, re-uti­lized, or repro­duced in any form with­out writ­ten per­mis­sion of the author.

P.S. For addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion about the the­o­ret­i­cal back­ground, method­ol­o­gy, ana­lyt­i­cal tools, design and results of the study please con­tact the author. Con­tact infor­ma­tion could be obtained at the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists.