Reporters Without Borders: There has been no improvement in the media coverage of “election campaign”

International organisation Reporters Without Borders are not satisfied with coverage of the “election campaign” by the Belarusian media. The organisation concluded it after seeing the report of the monitoring conducted by the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) and the OSCE.

An appropriate article appeared at the website of the organisation www.rsf.org on September 26, the press service of the BAJ reports.

Based on conclusions of the BAJ’s monitoring on absence of political debates in media, the RSF said: “We regret that there has been no improvement in the media coverage of the campaign for the legislative elections, especially this was a chance for Belarus to normalise its relations with the international community.”

The RSF also quotes an extraction from the OSCE report, presented on September 19, criticising the state-controlled media: “Media coverage, both on the national and local level, has been almost exclusively focused on procedural aspects of the election process. Most media, predominantly state-funded, have paid extensive attention to the president, as well as to other state authorities..., rather than on the role of the parliament or the candidates.”

The organisation also notices the problems, journalists have faced ahead of voting. In particular, they set an example of the incident with Yury Dzyadzinkin, a reporter for the independent daily “Narodnaya Vola”, who could not take any photos at a polling station during the early voting because the head of the polling station had forbidden it.