IS THE PRESS YELLOW OR THE SPEECHES OF THE GOVERNMENT?
James Hakobyan

Lragir.am
12:45:07 – 29/10/2008

The "yellow" press has written another "false" story about the
relatives and friends of high-ranking government officials who behave
brazenly, violating laws. This time the story which was published
in the Haykakan Zhamanak was about the son of Member of Parliament
Sashik Sargsyan, Serge Sargsyan’s brother, who together with his
friends provoked a quarrel in one of the disco clubs of Yerevan,
a young man was beaten and lost his eye.

How is the government going to respond to this story? Judging by the
state of the nation address of the president, the police must carry
out an unbiased investigation, reveal the motive of the beating,
the wrongdoers, the participants and hold accountable the person or
persons who caused the skirmish and caused the loss of the eye of
the young man. After all, Serge Sargsyan assumed the responsibility
to state that he is not going to tolerate that separate people will
consider themselves to be above the law.

Therefore, even if Sashik Sargsyan’s son and his friends had every
reason to beat and severely injure someone, the law prohibits doing
that, because there is a system of justice in our country, the purpose
of which is to prevent lynching.

Most probably, however, the events will follow the same path as the
previous innumerable precedents. In other words, the government will
do everything to erase the traces of Serge Sargsyan’s nephew in all
that happened. It will ascribe publications to the "yellowness" and
will present it as just another justification for battle on "yellow"
press because that press crushes the society’s confidence in the
high-ranking government officials, their relatives and friends. It is
also possible that there will be one or two revelations in name only,
and one or two may be punished.

After all, a young man got a disability, and this circumstance a
little complicates the affair of hiding everything and presenting as
"white fever", as it is usually the case.

What will the government thereby attain? It depends on what it wants
to attain. The point is that when the publications in the press
are defined as misinformation, and the press is declared yellow,
it does not change the black color of the government’s behavior into
pink in the eyes of the society. Moreover, the society learns about
an incident before the press because Yerevan is too small a city,
Armenia is too small a country for the pace of the information, and
very often the press writes about what people already know. Moreover,
people do not wait for the newspapers to come out to read the news
but wait to see what the press will write in the morning about what
they learned at night.

Hence, if the government thinks that by refuting the information in
the press and describing it as a lie it may produce the impression of
a different reality on the society, it is badly mistaken. When Robert
Kocharyan was the president, all the responsible TV channels tried to
produce that impression, which they are doing now when Serge Sargsyan
is the president. However, the days following the presidential election
showed that in Armenia it is impossible to deceive the society with
television because the smallness of the country enables the citizens
to get first-hand information almost about everything, and distinguish
the false and the true press.

It is also possible that the government does not care about what
the press will write. They refute all by the way. After all they
would not admit beating and not being sorry for that. Although,
this is also possible. They will settle the scores with the "yellow"
press, there would be no one to write, the responsible press would
write about everything except for the brazenness of the government,
and Armenia would go on. However, it is difficult to say where the
citizens of Armenia will go, or where each will go. There is no need
to beat the citizens and then sprinkle salt on the wound by refuting
the beating. After all if the government wages an undeclared war
on the citizens through the brazenness of their close and distant
representatives and relatives, it should take into account that in
the end everyone or at least separate citizens may "counterattack"
for self-defense. And at that time even the bill on bodyguards worked
out by the ARF Dashnaktsutyun will not be useful to the government.