Let me say it directly, I don’t really like the journalistic style of my younger colleagues, depending on the political positions of the news agency they’re working at, “looking for a slip up” politicians trying to “spoil” those people. It seems to me that it’s not the problem of journalism but the propaganda. Let’s confess that a significant part of the media outlets is involved in propaganda.
Moreover, journalists of both opposition and government are doing it aggressively by formulating their “questions” as a rebellion. And they don’t try to inform people or analyze the situation with their articles but scourge, blame and cause pain. It’s clear that it’s not only the demand of their editorial but also of their readers and followers. I wouldn’t say that it’s just an Armenian phenomenon. Nobody can say that, for instance, during Trump’s rule, CNN was not doing propaganda. In my opinion, a media outlet cannot have a weekly TV program named, for instance, “Another lie of Trump”.
But this is my personal approach, which is connected to my character, my style, and my worldview. My colleagues can build their careers as they want, I don’t want to force my opinion on anyone. I, as a private person, have a right to express my opinion, which won’t have “legal consequences”. But the members of the government don’t have that right to use their legal levers to turn their ideas about journalistic ethics into law. These ideas are not only subjective but also one-sided: they will spread among the oppositional journalists and bypass their journalists, who let me repeat are as much aggressive as the oppositional journalists. I mean getting the right of depriving the accreditation of the state institutions. It’s not a secret for anyone that they mean only one institution, the parliament, in the corridors of which the members of the Civil Contract have a short fuse and don’t want to answer the questions of the oppositional journalists. They don’t want to be burdened with that. If they pass the law, they will be avoiding a headache, although they behave like hooligans. And pro-government journalists will continue asking the same questions to the oppositional MPs. Only the unwanted journalists for the Civil Contract will get punished.
I believe that the officials should not have a right to deprive journalists of accreditation, despite the fact of how s/he behave. It would be perfect that these matters won’t be at the government’s discretion but will be solved within the journalistic community. Particularly the question of depriving the journalists who have shown inappropriate behavior of the accreditation should be solved by journalistic NGOs. Unfortunately, there is not an NGO that is prestigious for the majority of the media outlets. For instance, I trust the Media Ethics Observatory. If that institution considers that I suggest us to change a journalist of Aravot, who is accredited to some state institution, I would consider that suggestion reasonable. But I exclude that one of our journalists wouldn’t be the case.
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Aram Abrahamyan
