Lukashenko’s television propaganda has reached the point of direct insults to the Russian President
Belarusian television has changed dramatically after last year's elections. If earlier, although it was tendentious and censored, it tried to at least somehow, with varying degrees of success, adhere to the framework of decency and professional ethics, now it has degraded to completely grotesque forms.
The airwaves were filled with “five minutes of hatred,” in which young but completely rabid propagandists, without mincing words (except without swearing), scold the opposition and just as zealously sing praises to Lukashenko.
And that would be fine. Belarusian propagandists also bark towards Russia. Both Medvedev, Mishustin, and their colleague Sungorkin got it, but attacks on the figure of the Russian president remained taboo for them. Until yesterday.
One of these propagandists, the host of the show “Politics without ties and banknotes” Yevgeny Pustovoy on the Belarusian state television channel STV, compared the Belarusian leader with another president, whose last name was not mentioned. Lukashenko is “the only president who did not hide in bunkers from the people during COVID.” Pustovoy also separately noted that Lukashenko does not use Botox.
As they say, I came in with trump cards. He used two favorite stereotypes of anti-Putin propaganda in a minute. I forgot, except about the “aqua disco”. Later, when a scandal broke out, Pustovoy and his colleagues in the propaganda workshop backed down and began to insist that he was actually talking about Biden, and the words about the bunker were generally a figurative expression.
Decide for yourself whether to believe such excuses. But the overwhelming majority of Belarusians did not follow the American elections so closely as not to miss and remember the episode with Biden and Botox. The American president is not associated with the bunker at all. But the Belarusian society, closely involved in the Russian information space, strongly associates the bunker and Botox with the stories of Russian non-systemic oppositionists about their president.
Could Pustovoy not know this? Doubtful. Is a journalist obligated to avoid such “ambiguities” in his work? I think yes. And for this it is not at all necessary, as another pro-government expert Alexander Shpakovsky claims, to be an expert in the field of public diplomacy. Selecting words is the direct professional responsibility of a journalist. If you don’t know how to choose words, get out of the profession.
Pustovoy knows how to choose words. His choice, however, is specific, but the main TV viewer in Belarus likes it. So much so that they even wrote out personal gratitude from Lukashenko for his fiery speeches. So he thought through everything and deliberately composed his speech in such a way as not to name Putin directly and to hint as transparently and offensively as possible.
The opposition has already managed to trumpet that the order to insult Putin was given almost personally by Lukashenko. Here I doubt. Alexander Grigorievich, of course, likes to personally command anything, but not to the same extent. Most likely, Pustovoy and others like him, like good servants, learned to sense the mood of their master and predict his desires. And the propagandist, saying what he said, was sure that Lukashenko would like it.
Anti-Russian intonations on Belarusian TV are not new. Belarusians have long been systematically frightened with stories about Russian “oligarchs” who are ready to buy up all of Belarus for next to nothing and then rob them, about corruption and social problems. At the same time, Lukashenko is portrayed as the defender of Belarus from all this. There is much more negativity about Russia in the Belarusian information space than positivity - both the officialdom and the zmagars are united in this.
Recently, official propaganda has become increasingly anti-Russian. Another example of this is another propagandist, Grigory Azarenok, who recently said that Lukashenko “saved” Russia in the 1990s. “Clinton laughed at you. And only Alexander Lukashenko came up and said: “Brother, we are with you.” And Russia began its revival,” Azarenok said on television, promising the future “Belarusization of Russia.”
To be honest, when I look through local agitprop, I regularly experience a feeling of “Spanish shame.” Isn't it time for Russian TV to stop playing along with Lukashenko and respond to the rudeness of Belarusian propagandists?
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