



{"id":6113,"date":"2016-03-15T00:19:27","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T00:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/not-abusing-freedom-is-the-medias-job-davit-harutyunyan\/"},"modified":"2016-03-15T00:19:27","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T00:19:27","slug":"not-abusing-freedom-is-the-medias-job-davit-harutyunyan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/newsroom\/2016\/03\/15\/6113\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Not Abusing Freedom&#8221; Is the Media&#8217;s Job: Davit Harutyunyan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The proposed provision in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.venice.coe.int\/webforms\/documents\/?pdf=CDL-REF%282016%29018-e\">new draft of Armenia&#8217;s Electoral Code<\/a> that &#8220;during the election campaign, abuse of freedom of the mass media is not permitted,&#8221; according to the authors of the bill, &#8220;must be implemented through self-regulation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Minister and Chief of Staff of the Armenian Government Davit Harutyunyan expressed this opinion on the RFE\/RL&#8217;s Armenian service (Azatutyun Radio) program &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oT3vW2Cju3w\"><em>Tesaketnery Khachmeruk<\/em><\/a>&#8221; (&#8220;at the crossroads of opinions&#8221;) [AM].<\/p>\n<p>To program creator and host Anna Israeyelyan&#8217;s question &#8220;Can you explain what is the abuse of media freedom, how that abuse will be decided, and what liabilities will be applied to media that abuse freedom,&#8221; Harutyunyan replied:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Not all violations necessarily imply sanctions. Very often other regulatory mechanisms are in place, such as, for example, rules of conduct.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In explaining the concept of &#8220;abuse of freedom&#8221; of the media, Harutyunyan cited as an example analytical programs, which &#8220;very often have a purely propagandistic in nature&#8221; and which &#8220;are not officially framed as an element of the election campaign.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To the journalist&#8217;s remark that this might be perceived as censorship, Harutyunyan replied, &#8220;Everything might be, and for this reason there&#8217;s no state sanction here. But it is assumed that there should be a rule: the legislator defines the rule, but as for how this rule will be implemented, it seems to me, by self-regulation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Harutyunyan is the government representative appointed to report in the National Assembly on the new government bill on the electoral code, as well as on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.media.am\/en\/tv-radio-law-draft\">draft law<\/a> to the amendments on election campaigning in the Law on TV and Radio Broadcasting.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rteright\"><strong>Ruzanna Khachatrian<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The proposed provision in the new draft of Armenia&#8217;s Electoral Code that &#8220;during the election campaign, abuse of freedom of the mass media is not permitted,&#8221; according to the authors of the bill, &#8220;must be implemented through self-regulation.&#8221; Minister and Chief of Staff of the Armenian Government Davit Harutyunyan expressed this opinion on the RFE\/RL&#8217;s<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/newsroom\/2016\/03\/15\/6113\/\"> Read the full article&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6108,"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-6113","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\/6113","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=6113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}