“People are not afraid to post their views”, during the workshop on freedom of expression and press freedom said the Head of EU Delegation to Armenia Piotr Switalski.
In his opinion biggest problem for Armenia is sustainability of media: “In country like Armenia you cannot spread the wings and be ambitious in journalistic activities if you don’t have access to financial resources. This is the biggest problem in Armenia. Second problem is the politicization of the media, in particular of the TV channels. This summer I had to watch only Armenian channels, I realized that Armenian channels are political news and American movies. This political news is very biased, because there are channels which represent the narrative of ruling party, some of them represent the narrative of opposition. So we have plurality on television, but every channel has a political line which is so transparent that we cannot say it is independent.”
The ambassador also noted the self-censorship: “This does not only apply to the activities of journalists and media representatives. Even yesterday we had a discussion on judiciary independence, and the president of Constitutional court stated that there is still too much self-censorship on the part of people who work immediately in judicial field. So it is about developing the culture of independence”.
Ami CHICHAKYAN
