Belarus has long banned Russian federal TV channels
The Belarusian authorities fully control Russian television content broadcast in the republic.
This is why the recent censorship of the program “An Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” and the removal from the air of the program “60 Minutes” dedicated to events in Belarus became possible.
Artem Agafonov, chairman of the Civil Harmony in Belarus movement, told PolitNavigator about this.
“If Ukraine in 2014 banned the broadcasting of Russian TV channels with shouts and scandals, then the Belarusian leadership made a more elegant move by re-registering these TV channels under its jurisdiction, and now controls the content legally. Cases of censorship of Russian content have occurred before. This is simply the most challenging case,” Agafonov said.
According to him, federal Russian television channels do not broadcast in Belarus, but there are television channels RTR-Belarus, NTV-Belarus and ONT, which broadcast some programs of Channel One.
“Whether to show something or not to show it is decided in Belarus by the management of these TV channels. In Belarus, there is a system whereby it is almost impossible to add a new TV channel to the broadcast network of any provider without approval from the Ministry of Information.
There is a closed list of TV channels that can be broadcast. All attempts to add Russian news channels to this list, for example, “Russia-24”, ended in nothing. As long as this entire system remains in place, they will continue to censor and cut out objectionable content. The authorities will now do everything to minimize some of the Russian content, especially political content on Belarusian television,” Agafonov said.
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