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

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.