Belarus parliament elections

Call on Belarusian regional media outlets to increase share of analytical articles

MINSK, 28 October (BelTA) - Regional media should increase the share of analytical articles, including those on pressing social and political issues, Belarus First Deputy Information Minister Pavel Lyogky said as he spoke at the forum “Elections 2019: Role of Regional Media in Shaping Public Opinion on the Election Campaign” in Minsk, BelTA has learned.

“If we evaluate the genre palette of the regional media, we see an obvious lack of good analytical materials,” Pavel Lyogky said.

There is a lack of both political analytics and analytical materials on sports and cultural subjects. “People are increasingly interested in what you call exclusive, analytics, analytical comments. If you want dry information, you turn to the internet,” he said.

According to the first deputy minister, the number of op-eds by editors-in-chief is decreasing. At the same time, these people are the leaders of opinion in the region, in some sense, and their point of view is very important.

Regional media outlets should post more information on pressing social topics on their pages, Pavel Lyogky believes. In that regard, he cited the example: they analyzed 135 issues of a regional media outlet and found as few as 79 materials dedicated to a problematic theme. Of these, one theme was raised at the initiative of readers, four by journalists, and the remaining 74 by local authorities.

Local media also have to address the problem of fake news materials which now dominate the information space, especially social networks. It is  not for nothing that Facebook is testing a new News tab in the U.S. The social network has signed contracts with several hundreds of the world's largest outlets to buy the professional content which has been fact-checked and verified. Realizing that the trust in traditional media is growing and that many people are leaving social networks because of a great amount of fake news, Facebook tries to prevent this situation.

The forum “Elections 2019: Role of Regional Media in Shaping Public Opinion on the Election Campaign” brought together about 150 journalists from regional media in Minsk. The event, organized by the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus with the support of the Information Ministry, covered the issues of journalistic work during the election campaign.

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