Perhaps the most irritating part about the entire Belarus affair right now is the lies that come out of the Russian media, and the two-faced and often misled reporting done by many news organizations in Europe. For the former, they tell a story completely dislodged from reality; so far off that you can’t really tell if they believe it, or if they’re just trying to hide their grin. For the latter, they either tell the story to the West and repeat the lies to the East, or are simply so lazy in collecting information that they end up benignly repeating government propaganda.

Br23 takes a look at the coverage from Euronews and finds it very disappointing. The stories in English and Russian are completely different. Take a look at this:

English headline: Riot police break up Belarus demo
Russian translation: Belarusian revolutionaries ran out of fuel

English opening paragraph: ???????Some 200 protesters were arrested and loaded on to waiting trucks after around 100 troops surrounded October Square in the capital Minsk in the early hours.???????
Russian translation: ???????Belarusian police carried out a preventive operation on October square. In 15 minutes all protesters were pushed out from the square, loaded into buses and transported into police station???????.

English, 2nd paragraph: ???????Groups of demonstrators had camped out in freezing weather in the square since Sunday????????s poll – condemned by the opposition and Western observers as flawed. During his 12 years in office, Lukashenko has shown little tolerance for dissent.???????
Russian translation: None. This paragraph is missing in the Russian version.

English, 3rd paragraph: ???????The former Soviet republic became independent in 1991 but a push to revive the Belarusian language and culture was crushed by Lukashenko.???????
Russian translation: None. This sentence is missing in the Russian version.

The Transitions Online Belarus Blog takes a look at the same kind of story being repeated on Russian television, mostly through the words of government officials. Even NTV, the once only independent television station in Russia which had been taken over by Putin after his ascent to power. RIA Novosti repeat Sergei Lavrov’s comments, “I would not call what we saw on television a ‘breaking up’. What we saw in Minsk cannot be compared with what is going on in a number of European countries.” Of course, by what you see on TV via those stations and the Belarus state television, anyone might believe that the protestors were simply trash to be disposed of.

This information ends up infecting the free media. Take a look at this Reuters report. Though Reuters has never been exceptional in its quality, its reports are used in thousands of newspapers all over the world. The fact that it made a point to note a lack of police brutality, when that’s obviously not true, only helps to serve the regime.