Assures President of the Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan
The Armenian mass media spread an information that the well-known Freedom House human rights organization has published the rating of the freedom of the press worldwide, according to which Armenia ranks the 135th and takes the leading positions compared to Azerbaijan and Russia. According to the Freedom House, the press freedom situation in Armenia is in the boundary of “partially free” and “not free”. The representative of this human rights organization and expert Elen Aghekyan, who spoke on Armenia, said that we are on the boundary of “partly free” and “not free” press because of the traditional matters, as well as the hostile attitude of the officials towards the journalists and a few number of independent votes in the press. The expert considered important in her speech and positive that the internet news media have become more in Armenia’s news outlets. The expert has expressed other opinions about Armenia.
“Aravot” talked on this to the president of the Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan, asking his opinion, in this regard, Boris Navasardyan said that he is familiar with the disseminated material, however, he doubts on its accuracy. Boris Navasardyan opines that a wrong reporting of the material or the translation has happened. “This is the reporting of our media, so I’m not sure that it is true. It often happens that one takes from the other and do not orient correctly and on the timing of whether it is an old or a new reports and so on.” Boris Navasardyan opines that the fact that we are in the leading position compared to Azerbaijan and Russia, there is nothing new here, because over the years, according to him, Armenia ranks higher in all of the companies ranking reports, which refers to freedom of expression, and in his opinion, this is neither positive nor negative reflection of the change.
And the fact that Armenian ranks the 135th in the report of the Freedom House, Boris Navasardyan notes that it is not an occasion to be excited that we are in the leading position that Azerbaijan. “The places, however, is a little conventional indicator, we could be in any place, but if we are satisfied with the situation of press freedom, we can particularly not be sad. The matter is that there are very little grounds for being satisfied. We see that the broadcast media are almost totally under the control of the executive power. We see that from time to time, there are threats related to freedom of the Internet, which come largely under the influence of Russia, and this influence has been intensified after our joining the EaEU, because the standards to regulate the Internet that currently exist in Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan, can be transferred to Armenia.” Back to increase of Internet media, and the question of whether the quantity meets the quality, Boris Navasardyan said the following: “We can not say for sure that this is a positive thing, however, a large quantity speaks of the fact that there are bigger grounds for diversity, but on the other hand, our journalistic and audience resources are limited. We are a small country and if this resource is dispersed in this way, naturally, it does not contribute for the quality of the Internet media to be on an appropriate level”.
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Eva HAKOBYAN
