ARMENIAN ELECTION COVERAGE ‘WORSENING’
By Astghik Bedevian
Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
Dec 10 2007
Armenia’s main broadcasters have grown even more tendentious over the
past month in their coverage of the upcoming presidential election,
openly promoting the frontrunner, Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian,
and attacking his most formidable opponent, a media watchdog said
on Monday.
The Yerevan Press Club (YPC) has been monitoring the election-related
news coverage of the Armenian Public Television and Radio as well as
six private TV channels and releasing reports on a monthly basis. It
criticized the broadcasters last month for showing "unprecedented"
bias against opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosian and casting
Sarkisian in a highly positive light.
Unveiling the findings of its latest monthly monitoring, the YPC
said the situation has further deteriorated since then. "There
are unprecedented phenomena which we have not witnessed in the
past," the YPC chairman, Boris Navasardian, told reporters. "That
includes an overtly negative coverage of opposition candidate Levon
Ter-Petrosian. It’s even more large-scale than what our previous
monitoring detected."
According to Navasardian, the Public TV and Radio are particularly
active in vilifying Armenia’s former president. He said the
state-controlled H1 TV channel, the most accessible in the country,
aired 47 overwhelmingly critical reports on Ter-Petrosian in
November. Sarkisian’s name, by contrast, figured in the news for 148
times and almost always in the positive context, he added.
The YPC monitoring also found that the public radio aired over a
hundred Ter-Petrosian-related reports in November and that 80 percent
of them were "negative."
"In terms of the volume [of news coverage] Levon Ter-Petrosian holds
the number place at the radio," said Navasardian. "That’s a unique
phenomenon." "It is unfortunate that that is being done by media
outlets which we previously cited as positive examples," he added,
referring to their coverage of last May’s parliamentary elections
praised by Western observers.
The YPC suggested that the TV coverage is now far more biased because
the outcome of the presidential election scheduled for February 19 is
less predictable than that of the May polls. "The more unpredictable
the election outcome becomes, the more unethically media outlets
behave," he said.
The Armenian authorities say that Ter-Petrosian is backed by less than
5 percent of voters and will not be even Sarkisian’s main opposition
challenger. Observers believe, however, that they see a much greater
threat emanating from the ex-president.
Navasardian criticized Ter-Petrosian as well, saying that he has
turned down offers to be interviewed by unnamed TV stations. "It’s
easier to talk at a rally," he said. "You say only what you want to
say and don’t have to answer resulting questions.