Press Freedom Week in Review

One of the most remark­able events was open­ing of the World Press Pho­to 2016 exhi­bi­tion in cre­ative space Cekh.

BAJ tra­di­tion­al­ly announced the short list of win­ners of the year­ly cre­ative con­test of BAJ Vol­naye Slo­va (Free Word). The award­ing cer­e­mo­ny is to take place in autumn.

Also, BAJ mem­bers shared their suc­cess sto­ries in a series Free­dom of Speech Changes Life, a wor­thy pos­i­tive read­ing.

On May 2, Belaru­sian online com­mu­ni­ty were espe­cial­ly hap­py for Vik­tar Mal­isheus­ki and his blog antijournalist.by for win­ning The Bobs, Best of Online Activism – the best blog in Russ­ian cho­sen by online vot­ing. “Thank you. For the first time I don’t know what to write. We are cool!” – con­fessed the blog­ger.

Arund the press free­dom days, debates were sparked about the val­ue of mod­ern-day mass media influ­ence.

In an opin­ion arti­cle on May 3 for Jour­nal­by.com, the writer and colum­nist Vik­tar Martsi­novich expressed his view that nowa­days “the media word has deval­ued. The author­i­ties no longer care what we know and think about them.” The phe­nom­e­non is based on the sit­u­a­tion when “there appeared a gap between media events and direct action, read­ers’ reac­tions got vir­tu­al­ized”.

The state­ment is sup­port­ed by fail sto­ries, among them we have also our com­mon fail­ure of not restor­ing jus­tice for our col­league Pavel Dabravol­s­ki.

The col­umn fell with­in eye­sight of state media think­ing heads, as it was dis­cussed in the Edi­tors’ Club on Belarus 1 TV chan­nel on May 8. The edi­tor-in-chief of SB.Belarus Segod­nya Pavel Yakubovich argued that there was even too much free­dom. More­over, these are “blog­gers who down­play the media field”, he thinks, as in the light of half-scan­dalous unwor­thy infor­ma­tion (he set as an exam­ple beat­ing of a vagrant in an under­ground pas­sage or a woman’s sui­cide attempt), so “in the light of such half-scan­dalous unwor­thy infor­ma­tion which starts pre­vail­ing in the media sphere, the pub­lic lost trust in the press, TV and radio”.

The state­ment fails to crit­i­cize in essence Martsinovich’s view, how­ev­er, it echoes well the fresh sug­ges­tion of the Russia’s Insti­tute of Devel­op­ment of the Inter­net to intro­duce reg­u­la­tions for small media (web­sites who do not have a mass media license of Roskomnod­zor). As state media chief rep­re­sen­ta­tives often hap­pened to be a mouth speak­er for back­stage nov­el­ties pre­pared by the offi­cials, the Inter­net com­mu­ni­ty expects some­thing not good (some­thing like a law reg­u­lat­ing blog­gers).

By the way, on May 11, the Infor­ma­tion Min­is­ter of Belarus Liliya Ananich opened the year­ly exhi­bi­tion Mass Media in Belarus. “When we held the first exhi­bi­tion (20 years ago), there were slight­ly over 800 peri­od­i­cals. There weren’t as many TV chan­nels. Today we have over 1.5 thou­sand out­lets. And the Inter­net tech­nolo­gies have devel­oped sig­nif­i­cant­ly,” she said.

Mean­time, slight­ly before that Belta quot­ed Liliya Ananich say­ing that Rus­sia and Belarus were work­ing togeth­er to cre­ate “a com­mon infor­ma­tion­al space”. “We in Belarus have always stuck to the idea that the infor­ma­tion space should serve to aims of our coun­try. For that it would serve to the cre­ation of the Union State and every­thing caused by the time, to con­sol­i­da­tion of efforts of states and peo­ples in solv­ing the most dif­fi­cult tasks.”

Briefly, on May 12 the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus and the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Mass Media of Rus­sia bid to adopt a plan for 2016 – 2017 and to set up “a spe­cial body that would resist to infor­ma­tion­al aggres­sion and work over for­ma­tion and pro­mo­tion of an attrac­tive image of the Union State (the Union State of Rus­sia and Belarus – note).”