Yerevan street traders organized a protest outside the Public TV and Radio building today. The vendors were indignant at a Feb. 10 broadcast of the TV program Tesankyun (\u201cView\u201d) hosted by Gevorg Altunyan, during which time, according to the vendors, the host had called them \u201cGikors,\u201d after the popular Hovhannes Tumanyan poem \u201cGikor,\u201d in which a village boy (Gikor) meets his tragic fate when he is sent to the city (Tbilisi, Georgia) by his father to work for a rich trader, Bazaz Artem.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo months after our protests, on public television, Gevorg Altunyan responded mockingly, calling us Gikor, and called those organizations and political parties that are trying to help us bases,\u201d said one of the demonstrators.<\/p>\n
Note, during Altunyan\u2019s program, when he was talking about the street vendors\u2019 protests, a segment from the film Gikor was shown.<\/p>\n
The host, writing on Facebook, commented on today\u2019s protest:<\/p>\n
\u201cReally, there\u2019s nothing dirtier than politics. Two days ago, I reported on the protests by street vendors. And I said that many political forces are now going to run to take advantage of these people, according to their interests. TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF. And already today, some of those who TAKE ADVANTAGE OF others were already off to work, bringing the street vendors\u2019 rally against me. They say that I\u2019ve insulted them. But they say it clearly: who have I insulted, those who are protesting or those who TAKE ADVANTAGE OF them?\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n Yerevan street traders organized a protest outside the Public TV and Radio building today. The vendors were indignant at a Feb. 10 broadcast of the TV program Tesankyun (\u201cView\u201d) hosted by Gevorg Altunyan, during which time, according to the vendors, the host had called them \u201cGikors,\u201d after the popular Hovhannes Tumanyan poem \u201cGikor,\u201d in which a village boy (Gikor) meets his tragic fate when he is sent to the city (Tbilisi, Georgia) by his father to work for a rich trader, Bazaz Artem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsroom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}