The Reporters Without Borders organization has published a report, according to which during the past year progress was made in Armeniain terms of freedom of press. There really is progress, but it is very small, because A1+ is still off the air, TV companies continue to be managed from the Presidential Residence (although not in the harsh manner that was common during Robert Kocharyan’s presidency) and pointless lawsuits are brought against newspapers and the same pointless rulings are made. It is mentioned that Armeniais in the “honorable” 77th place. It is a small consolation, because: a. we should be among the first ten given the mental potential of our people, b. we should be a few times more developed, than our neighbors in terms of democracy, in order to promote our national issues. It has been said lots of times about that, it isn’t worth to repeat.
It is worth to understand, instead, which the roots of the current situation are. Imagine a governor who wants to send a message to the population of his region. He establishes his regional newspaper and TV channel for those messages, through which he communicates with the population. If there are mass media in the region that are not in his pocket, at least, he will do everything he can not to communicate with those and not answer their questions. I.e. there is a clear distinction between “ours” and “not ours,” “friendly” and “hostile” mass media.
The sad thing is that this logic applies to not only the government circles. We are dealing with a common psychological problem. The oppositionists are also guided by “friend-enemy” principle. The Armenian National Congress (ANC) leader said exactly that among his supporters, after which, however, he took back his words. So, fresher example – yesterday our newspaper published former prisoner of conscience Samvel Abovyan’s letter addressed to ANC, where that organization was criticized. Since Aravot cares for neither ANC, nor UN, nor the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), nor else the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) – all of them are our source of information – and since our professional principles require listening also to the opposite side, we applied to the Congress, requesting an answer. We took into consideration also the fact that the same ANC wrote a letter to Aravot on December 9 (we have published it too), where it urges us in a rather didactic manner “to clarify” and “get a comment” from the ANC “competent representative.” We did as they had said. However, “competent representative” Armen Khachatryan, a member of the Congress legal commission said that he would not make any comments for Aravot.
Amalyan distributes frequencies to fellow TV companies; the ANC functionary makes comments for fellow mass media. Naturally, he would do the same thing, if he were Amalyan.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
