Government-aligned TV and opposition-backed newspapers dominate Armenia’s mediascape. VIKTOR POSUDNEVSKY reports
In 2002 Mark Grigorian, a freelance journalist in Armenia, was walking in the street when somebody threw a grenade at him. The bomb exploded, injuring but not killing him. He has since left Armenia and now lives in London, where he works for the Russian BBC service.
Grigorian suffered the attack while on an independent investigation into Armenia’s infamous “parliamentary shooting” of October 1999. In an incident that made global headlines, six armed terrorists stormed the Armenian parliament and shot dead the country’s prime minister along with a number of other officials.
The story is now all but forgotten in the wider world, but in Armenia it still dominates public discourse, almost ten years on. And most are dissatisfied with the official version of events.
“The attack is still a big mystery in Armenia,” says Emil Danielyan, a journalist with the Armenian branch of Radio Free Europe (which is funded by the US Congress).
There have been no independent investigations, and Grigorian could be the only person to have come close to uncovering the truth about the shooting which shocked his nation and the world.
Violence, mysterious characters, fear and a lot of unanswered questions – these have become almost routine for at least some of Armenia’a journalists. While the attack on Mark Grigorian was definitely the most savage, it is by no means the only one.
Another Armenian journalist, Liana Sayadyan – deputy editor of Hetq, an online publication and newspaper – compiled a list of attacks on Armenian journalists between 2006 and 2007. There were 13 altogether, and according to Sayadyan, none of these cases led to convictions in court.
There has been no formal censorship in Armenia since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. But self-censorship prevails.
“Broadcasting and print in Armenia operate in very different environments,” explains Radio Free Europe’s Danielyan. “The extent of freedom granted to them is very different.”
Armenians don’t like reading newspapers, and the largest circulation in this country of three million people is a paltry 6,000. TV is much more popular and this media is subjected to the strictest government control.
“The President, Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and a number of leading business oligarchs allied with the government are shielded from criticism,” says Sayadyan in reference to public television.
“The two newspapers with largest circulation are controlled by the opposition,” adds Danielyan. “They are extremely critical of the government. They feel free to write whatever they want and the picture they give is completely different to the picture on public television.”
Nevertheless, these newspapers are not objective, and the quality of their reporting is “quite low”.
According to Armenians, one can almost feel like living in two different countries due to great differences in coverage by various media. Never was this more obvious than during opposition protests in February 2008, which divided the nation.
After the ruling party won the presidential election in Armenia, its political opposition mounted a big protest reminiscent of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The mass protest was violently suppressed by Armenian police on 1 March 2008.
“In the eyes of the tiny number of print media that supported the opposition, all this was seen as a pan-national outburst in which 100,000-300,000 people participated,” says Sayadyan. “But for the pro-government media the protestors were only a few score homeless and drug addicts who had been paid $10 to show up at the rallies and to sleep out in the tent-city pitched in Freedom Square.”
Christian Garbis was born in the USA to Armenian parents. He moved to Armenia in 2004 and started one of the first blogs in the country. Garbis says he trusts neither broadcast nor print media. “Newspapers are biased,” he says. “They offer commentaries about current news, but usually a day or so after the fact.
“The best way to obtain current news is online, and there are numerous news services. Another alternative, strange as it may sound, is by word of mouth.”
The dissatisfaction with Armenian media has contributed to the growth of blogging. “Personal media – the blog – became very widespread and turned into a real alternative to the traditional media outlets,” says Sayadyan, speaking of the events of February 2008. “Each person participating in the rallies recorded or photographed the events and posted it on their blogs and chronicled each successive demonstration.”
