Campaigning for the parliamentary election in Armenia has officially begun. It runs from Apr. 8 to May 4. Obviously, this provides an excellent opportunity for news outlets to supplement their income. But perhaps this time news outlets will endeavor not to report blindly on candidates’ every speech, which aim to throw dirt on other candidates and tarnish their names.

Remember the 2008 presidential election campaign: one of the candidates on every convenient occasion would recall his “creation program” while simultaneously criticizing another candidate.

During these same elections, the category of “the dark and cold years” (referring to the hard times of the early 90s when Armenia had just regained independence) even made it to TV soap operas. For example, in one program, a Diasporan Armenian was saying, “It was really bad 15 years ago. Now it’s good — they’re building buildings; there’s light.” For the critical among us, all this had the opposite effect because they were thinking, they’re trying to brainwash us. Everything was done quite roughly, in a primitive fashion.

Let’s also remember the 2007 parliamentary election. During the campaign, National Unity party leader Artashes Geghamyan announced that the family of then Defense Minister and later Prime Minister (and now Armenian President) Serzh Sargsyan had ordered Prosperous Armenia Party leader Gagik Tsarukyan to be murdered. But Geghamyan’s smear campaign wasn’t substantiated. Another example: by way of an unidentified person, news appeared in French media, according to which Republican Party of Armenia members and ministers had lost a great deal of money at Monte Carlo. There was smearing in effect also “in favor of” Gagik Tsarukyan — and the scandal was disseminated by his mother, Roza Tsarukyan. One of the papers published an interview with Roza Tsarukyan in which she said: “Good that we don’t pay taxes! What, pay so that they can play with them in Monte Carlo?”

A real masterpiece of a smear campaign can be called a report published on Apr. 21, 2007, in the paper Golos Armenii, which stated that during a meeting between then opposition party Orinats Yerkir (Rule of Law) leader Artur Baghdasaryan and a high-ranking British diplomat, the party leader tried to convince the diplomat to give negative assessments of Armenia’s election campaign period. Getting mixed up in the debate was even then president Robert Kocharian, who reportedly called Baghdasaryan a traitor. In response to this accusation, Baghdasaryan said “traitors are those who rig elections and disgrace the country.”

It’s important that news outlets differentiate between smear campaigns and real journalism and as much as possible try to maintain a neutral stance and ensure political pluralism.

Tigran Hovhannisyan