The clouds that have been gathering over Vartan Oskanian and Civilitas recently concern me first of all because it can impede and even, God forbid, block the work of www.civilnet.am
website. In this case, I am absolutely not interested in who really owns that website – Oskanian, Huntsman, the Mormons, the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) or Robert Kocharyan. Both as a user of that website and as the one who cooperates with Civilnet, I can assert that the influence of the above-mentioned “sources” on the everyday work couldn’t be felt and didn’t cause any constraints in any way. It, by the way, testifies to the fact that smart management and professionalism neutralize the factor of “sources,” if not completely, by 90%-95%. Do you feel that, for example, Echo of Moscow belongs to Gazprom.
The government has been finding unofficial “explanations” for the past 20 years to put mass media that it doesn’t like under pressure. For example, our leaders are regularly displeased with Radio Liberty, which, as it is known, is financed by the US Congress. In the first half of the 1990s, the explanation was that the Armenian editorship of this radio station was under the influence of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). Our folks even complained about this to James Baker, the US Secretary of State, when he came to our country in 1991. Afterwards, they started to say half-officially that this radio station participated in a conspiracy against Armenia and wanted to carry out an “orange revolution” here. I remember that Robert Kocharyan once refused to answer a question of the radio station’s journalist, stating that it was an American radio station, not an Armenian one. Well, as for A1+, according to the circles close to the government, it was a “Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) radio station” and therefore, it had to be deprived of broadcasting. Now Civilnet is ostensibly carrying out some far-reaching “Kocharyan-Mormon” projects.
In reality, Civilnet has managed to mature in a short period of time and plays quite a positive role in the field of information today. However, even if it hadn’t matured and hadn’t played, we should be concerned about any threat to any mass media, anyway, particularly when the source of the threat is obviously political and governmental. The path, the style, the sponsor, the legal and real owners of a mass media should not matter here at all. There are websites, which clearly express the opinion of the second president, good for them – and who said that there shouldn’t be such mass media. The more diverse opinions are, the better. And first of all we, the journalists, should be those who promote that diversity.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
