The Armenian public’s interest in the Jan. 16, 2013 murder of Aslan Ûsoyan (also known as “Grandpa Hassan” or “Ded Hasan”), to a certain extent, compensated for the monotony of the presidential elections. And it’s not like Armenian readers were fishing for every detail of the circumstances surrounding Ûsoyan’s death so as to avoid the same fate themselves — in my opinion, the news media has “trained” news consumers for such greed for information.

A survey of local news websites shows us what Armenian readers gravitate towards. Five days after Ûsoyan’s death, the news story remains on Tert.am’s Jan. 20 list of most read articles. RFE/RL’s Armenian service’s Jan. 19 interview with incumbent Serzh Sargsyan, which had been uploaded on the evening of the same day on the news outlet’s own website and republished on other sites only the following day, at 11:16 pm on Jan. 20 was that day’s fifth most read news story. This, when another article about Ûsoyan (“Journalists weren’t allowed to be present at Ded Hasan’s burial”) was in fourth place. This was not the piece that was to have interested Armenian readers more than, say, the interview with Serzh Sargsyan. Both, by the way, could be found on all the sites. In the interview, Sargsyan was speaking about the extent of personal guilt regarding the tragic events of Mar. 1–2, 2008; the issue of “extent,” in particular, was news for Armenian readers.

The interview with Sargsyan didn’t make the list of News.am’s most read stories when I checked at 11:23 pm on Jan. 20. Instead, from the top five of most read items, three were about Ûsoyan.

 

In all the local sites, Ûsoyan was and is a “leading” topic. It’s clear that readers are going from site to site, searching for additional details. A conspiratorial article titled “It’s possible that Ûsoyan will be buried in Armenia” is an “achievement” for News.am, since the news outlet’s correspondent personally spoke with Ûsoyan’s brother’s daughter, who is most likely living in Armenia (presumably after 4 pm), at a time when Russian websites three hours before were unanimously citing Interfax, which said that the body not yet in Tbilisi has returned to Moscow, where he will be buried — which, in any case, had been confirmed by the time the article was published. 

For six days, Armenian websites had become zealous particularly by referring to the Ûsoyan story. And that fervent activity more so speaks to “who” can move mountains in Armenia’s news media and “how” — even during the presidential elections. On Jan. 17, Ûsoyan had “seized” the top four places of News.am’s five most read articles. 

Of course, the interest is natural for several reasons: first, he is the most well-known mobster and thief in law of the post-Soviet states; second, they don’t kill Ûsoyan every day; and third, his name (“Ded Hasan”) tempts readers to be swept away by the “sequence of events”.

 

But readers have to be careful about one other invisible aspect. For our interest in Ûsoyan, TV stations have also trained us with their crime shows. I won’t say that they’ve trained all readers, but ratings are so that you understand for what news the army of readers is trained.

 

The first and fourth news stories in 1in.am’s Jan. 17 six most read articles were about Ûsoyan; while the second, fourth, and fifth items were about a sex worker, sex, and a woman who had “choked her boyfriend with her own breasts”. Readers were tempted in the third article not by former president Robert Kocharian, but by actor Gor Vardanyan — and he, I think, is “killing” people left and right in some film. 

Lurer.com “displays” Ûsoyan’s naked body in its “headline news” section. By the way, the photo is from Lifenews.ru, but the article in which it’s placed is Lurer.com’s own — “Who from Armenia is going to go to Ûsoyan’s burial” (fifth most read story as of 6:16 pm on Jan. 17)? In first place is the already one-day old article “Ded Hassan has been murdered”. It’s not that Robert Kocharian’s latest interview hasn’t made it to first place on local news websites; it’s just that the number of visits hasn’t exceeded 10,000.

And so, just as TV stations, by way of crime shows, “dictate” to readers what to read, so too readers are already “demanding” TV stations what “to stage”.

Mher Arshakyan

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