Epress.am News from Armenia
Public discussions of amendments to laws, particularly laws on TV and radio, must begin before those laws are adopted, and not after, when the public and the media stand before the fact, said Heritage Party MP Styopa (Stepan) Safaryan at a Jan. 27 conference on “Media in Armenia: 2010 Reflections and Trends for the Future.”
“How is it that before the competition announced by [Armenia’s] National Commission on Television and Radio (NCTR) no one doubts that GALA [TV] will be deprived of a license, while A1+ won’t return to [TV] broadcasting? All the polls will show: no one in the country doubted that it would be this way,” he said.
The TV channels left on air, according to the Heritage Party member, belong to political forces or are connected to some oligarch or another. “In the coming 10 years, we’re going to live within the conditions of those channels. That’s a tragedy for me,” he said.
According to the parliamentarian, Armenian authorities present the changes as improvements, deluding international bodies and the public.