Armenian TV Journalist ‘Pardoned’ and to Be Reinstated to His Job: Press

Political commentator Petros Ghazaryan, the anchor of Kentron TV’s Urvagits program who, according to previous reports, had been fired from the channel, will be back on the air next week, Kentron TV director Edgar Avagyan told Armtimes.com, insisting that Ghazaryan was only on vacation.

“Nothing has changed; Petros is currently on vacation, and I have not spoken to him yet. He is the author of ‘Urvagits,’ and it is obvious that when he returns to work, he will still be its anchor. Petros, like all of our other employees, have yearly vacations. We knew of the fact that Petros was to go on vacation two months before it happened, so in this respect I had nothing to tell him. There’s nothing extraordinary here,” Avagyan said.

Recall, on December 14 Ghazaryan’s Urvagits hosted comedian Sergey Danielyan who has recently created a satirical political party called “Active Civil Step” (the abbreviation of which spells “shit” in Armenian). The episode, however, was subsequently removed from Kentron TV’s Youtube channel, and local media reported that Ghazaryan was fired from the channel, to be replaced by former Shant TV and Public TV of Armenia political commentator Nver Mnatsakanyan.

Hraparak newspaper, however, now writes that “there was in fact a conflict between the channel and the journalist, but he has been pardoned.”

In the episode with Danielyan, Ghazaryan, a critic of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia, had commented on the comedian’s initiative, saying that Armenia did not actually need the comedian’s party for plundering the state budget since “there is already one main corrupt political party in the country. What’s the use for your party? [The plundering] is already being done quite nicely.”