State-owned media keep low-key approach to presidential election, says BAJ monitoring report

The Belarusian Association of Journalists has issued another monitoring report, which deals with the coverage of the second stage of the 2010 presidential election by the electronic and printed Belarusian media.

According to the report’s conclusions, the state-owned electronic and printed media kept to the low-key approach to the presidential election, though some media began to give it more coverage.            

‘The general picture of the election coverage did not change much, either. Its main actors were still the incumbent president, ‘the government’ as a depersonalized subject, CEC and territorial election commissions, whose actions received positive assessment. The state-owned media went on ignoring the potential contestants of the incumbent. Some minimal attention that they received was due to the registration procedure during the final period of monitoring. Thus, a positive assessment of the incumbent and his clearly dominant position in the state-owned media make part of their general strategy of the election coverage. The other side of the coin is marginalization of all the other contestants, whose identities remained unrevealed for the audience of the state-owned media,’ says the report.

The full text of the media monitoring report can be downloaded at the Belarusian Association of Journalists’ web-site.

‘Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections’