ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine how political contestation and dialogue take place in the news discourse of Belarusian national television. Stylistic suppression of opposing voices' means producing hegemony. The contrast between Belarus and the West is recursively applied to the relationship between Belarus' and the opposition', the latter being produced as the weak enemy within, sold out to the strong enemy without. Belarusian TV news discourse shows interviewees as sharing the same positions with each other as well as with news presenters and narrators. The polarizing categorizations correspond to what Wasburn and Burke describe as the cold-war news frame'. Bakhtin's conceptualization of discourse as a dialogue between different social positions proved to be useful for the analysis of Belarusian data in that it posed the general question of how news producers construct authorial vs. non-authorial views and the persons who take them.
