ECHO Research representative: "freedom of expression in the Armenian media was possible"

February 19, 2008

Yerevan /Mediamax/. Sector Director of the British ECHO Research
Company Karen Prichard stated in an interview to Mediamax that "we
have an excellent methodology for global media analysis".

Karen Prichard said this, commenting on Mediamax’s request today on
the statements on the unreliability of the report, prepared by ECHO
Research following the results of the monitoring of Armenian media. In
particular, the President of the Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardian
stated on February 14:

"We repeatedly noted that the newspapers are freer from authority
pressures, than the electronic media, and one cannot compare these
two completely different types of press. This is the same thing as
to mix oranges with pears".

"Radio, TV and printed press are different – but they are all forms
of media. Our brief was to look at freedom of media and we reported
on what we found; i.e. that in our opinion a high degree of freedom
existed in the printed press, but that the TV appeared to be more
influenced by government. If we had looked at blog (electronic)
reporting I’m sure we would have found something different again. We
pointed out several times that 7 days (in fact only 5 for printed
press) was a short period for the study and was in fact a snapshot,
however the fact that the media were able to print certain highly
critical articles, despite the ‘self censorship’ that we hear
exists, indicated to us that freedom of expression in the media
was possible. We feel we have an excellent methodology for global
media analysis and are viewed as expert witnesses in the UK", Karen
Prichard stated.

International ECHO Research Company presented in Yerevan on February
8 the report on the results of the media monitoring in Armenia for
the first week of the pre-election campaign, which evidenced its
balanced coverage. European Foundation for Democracy, based in
Brussels, ordered the monitoring.

Karen Prichard noted at the presentation of the report that
"the TV-channels quite fairly distribute the broadcast time
among the candidates, and the press is quite diverse". Experts of
the International ECHO Research Company analyzed 743 TV-reports,
radio-reports and newspaper articles, published in Armenia within the
first week of the pre-election campaign, and came to the conclusion
that 630 items from 743 showed no evidence of reporting bias.