Let’s imagine for a moment, during Independence Day celebrations in Baku, a group of women dressed in black — mothers of soldiers killed in the Azeri army (for there too there are no fewer victims during a period of non combat) — are staging a protest. Azerbaijani police forces push them, grab their posters, seize a protestor’s camera and erase all the photos… Or, let’s say, a few NGO representatives want to stage a march against the participation of the Turkish regiment (hypothetically speaking) in the military parade, but police detain the activists for two-and-a-half hours without even recording the incident… Get the picture?

 

And now imagine what sort of coverage such incidents in Baku would receive on so-called Armenian Public Television and the other television stations in their news broadcasts, what hideous remarks they would make about Azerbaijan…

 

And now let’s turn to Armenia. On Independence Day, Sept. 21, a group of women dressed in black, relatives of soldiers killed in the Armenian army during a period of non combat, had staged a protest. Police grabbed their posters and subject them to violence; they seized Tsovinar Nazaryan’s camera and erased all the photos from the protest…

 

On the morning of the same day, Gyumri-based Asparez Journalists’ Club President Levon Barseghyan and artist Arno Kur were detained at Kentron (“Central”) police division for organizing a protest against the presence of the Russian regiment in the military parade. They were held for two-and-a-half hours and police did not even record the incident.

 

I’m not a masochist, but I was forced to ruin my evening on Sept. 21 and from 8 pm onwards to sit in front of the television simultaneously watching news broadcasts on 4–5 channels (they all started at that time or at 8:30 pm in order to be able to live broadcast the holiday concert), in order to see whether any station would deem the aforementioned two incidents worthy of coverage… I knew the answer, of course, but I wanted to be convinced. Really, you had to be a masochist to watch 4–5 news broadcasts saying nearly the same words, covering nearly the same topics for more than an hour. In those reportages, there was everything or nearly everything… Absent were incidents that, in the opinion of those responsible for the news, “spoiled” the Independence Day celebrations.

 

But weren’t the protestors citizens of Armenia — shouldn’t their voices have been heard? No channel uttered a word about those incidents. In this case when there were not only text, but also photo reportages on online news sites — and there was even a video completely covering the incident of Levon Barseghyan being detained. 

 

One of the TV channels even broadcast a reportage at dawn: the reporter with her cameraman walked around Yerevan in the morning, spoke with the driver of the water truck that cleans the streets, then, at around the same time that Levon Barseghian was being detained by police, almost two intersections away from the Saryan statue (where the incident was taking place), filmed a children’s brass band and so on… She didn’t see the protest, didn’t see the police violence — she didn’t see probably because she was assigned not to see… Well, they weren’t going to ruin the holiday by describing a demonstration by a journalist and a group of his friends, were they? On another channel, there was a reportage on the recruitment of youth by one of the political parties and of course that party leader’s lengthy speech without pause. Well, there was no lack of festive reportages… I’m not saying that those reportages shouldn’t have been. But there should have been also news about the day’s incidents. The public should have known that there were also protest demonstrations…

 

I believe that this is what my friend Gegham Vardanyan also meant when in one of his recent pieces (of course, for a different occasion) he wrote that the Armenian television agenda has nothing to do with real life — or, he said that more or less. Read the Sept. 21 news on online news sites and compare them with the news on television (if, of course, like me you forced yourself to watch those broadcasts)… The comparison won’t be in favor of television. Meanwhile, television today still remains the most mass (i.e. widespread) media…

 

This too is the reason that we are forced to constantly register that it is not news, but propaganda that is broadcast on Armenian television.

 

And this too is the reason that the well-known anecdote still remains current: “Mom,” says the boy watching the news on television to his mother, “Can’t we sell everything we have and go live in the Armenia shown on HayLur…?”

 

Mesrop Harutyunyan

 

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.