EXPERIENCED REPORTERS OF RADIO LIBERTY BEING FIRED

AZG Armenian Daily
03/09/2008

Local

When recently, the Yerevan Bureau Chief of Radio Liberty, Atom
Margaryan was fired, reporters could not find out why and what was
the reason. That remained a secret.The story is repeated with Armen
Doulyan and Ruzan Khachatryan, who have both left Radio Liberty,
but remain steadfastly silent about the reasons.The media is also
silent, even though some of its representatives are usually very
outspoken in such cases. Our information indicates that both of
them have been invited by Public TV to have their own talk show,
which will be launched in late September.

However, there was some information among reporters as to why they
left Radio Liberty. According to this, Armen Doulyan, who was Acting
Bureau Chief before he left, sent a reporter to an event, only to
discover that Prague management also sent someone to cover the same
event. This seemed to have been a vote of no-confidence in him, which
angered Doulyan who served 14 years at Radio Liberty. We were not
able to verify this from Mr. Doulyan or ask him about other possible
reasons for his departure. Therefore, we have to be content with our
own assumptions.

Nobody doubts the fact that these journalists were all professionals
and well-informed media people know that they never catered to any
political or other special interests. It is also not a secret –
and regular listeners know well – that especially in the last six
months, Radio Liberty’s programs have assumed a distinctly ‘orange’
colour. The voices of the radical-pro-Levon opposition have a special
place in its programs and the two journalists have tried to maintain
a balance in their own reports and analytical pieces, by trying to
make the voices or other sides heard equally.

Our readers also remember the case of another professional journalist,
Anna Karapetian, who was unfairly fired from Radio Liberty more than
a year ago and now is suing the management in Czech courts. Likewise,
the firing of another experienced journalist, Armen Zakaryan, never
became a subject of discussion by our ‘liberal’ media. We would
like to just add that besides the Washington style, coded modus
operandi, for which we cannot blame the staff of a radio financed by
the U.S. Congress, the Armenian Service of RL suffers from another
problem – the intolerance of its director, Hrair Tamrazyan vis-à-vis
experienced journalists of his own generation. This possibly has
psychological roots. We leave the conclusion to the readers and to
Radio Liberty, its own slogans about plurality of opinion.

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