2024-07-23 12:29:51
Public Radio Director Garegin Khumaryan’s reference to the nature of public broadcasting and the situation surrounding his previous article:
“Parliament elects the members of the Television and Radio Commission.
The members of the Television and Radio Commission are appointed by the selection committee of the Board of Public Broadcaster.
The Public Broadcaster Board Selection Committee elects the members of the Public Broadcaster Board (pardon my French).
The members of the Board of the Public Broadcaster appoint the voters of the contests announced and held for the post of CEO (at least it has been so until now, and for example only 2 of the 5 voters who elected me were members of the Board of the Public Broadcaster).
Voters elect CEOs.
Public broadcasters are closed joint-stock companies, 100% of whose shares are, yes, in the hands of the state, but this five-level electoral labyrinth, among other legal guarantees, is put in place precisely to ensure that the CEO of Public is not suddenly a government official. directly appointed by and suddenly will not be part of the vertical of state administration.
Public broadcasting arrangements are designed so that the least resistance and competition in any of the links of the labyrinth activates the mechanism of checks and balances built into those arrangements, resulting in only and only added value to the public.
However, there is an inertia of perception around the public, that no matter how hard we try, we can’t overcome it yet.
We continue to be perceived as a state media, a part of the state administration system, a continuation of the state.
The government has created media, reduced funding, so that they ensure the presence of the state in the information field. We should have overcome this stereotype.
In fact, the opposite is true. The public, realizing that the work of private media can be influenced by the ideas of owners, big advertisers and their political patrons (I say this as someone who ran private media for a lifetime before going public), establishes its own media and mandates the government to take care of that media. expenses from the taxes he pays.
Another thing is that in the case of radio, we really bear the institutional scars of being a state media for decades, and then step by step turning into a public media again over the decades.
Once again, the public creates the media, delegates the government to take it on its balance sheet and pay its expenses.
This is the nature of public broadcasting.
We, the employees of the Public Radio, are guided by this principle, and our radio listeners know it very well, and I am sure that our radio listeners were not at all surprised by my previous article.
I was surprised by the situation created around it: the Public Broadcaster Council promised to examine the question of compliance with legal and ethical norms of my actions, and then reassigned that question to the Media Ethics Monitoring Body of the Self-Regulation Initiative of Armenian Media and Journalists.
However, there is something positive here. Any self-regulation is far better than attempts at vertical control, even in the face of resistance and competition on one of the maze’s steps.
Let’s try to win out of the situation. I have the impression that the created situation is fraught with the prospect of turning into a serious and fruitful professional debate about the future of reputable media, journalistic standards and values of public broadcasting.
Garegin Khumaryan
Executive Director
Public Radio of Armenia
P.S. Thank you so much for the hundreds of calls, messages and notes of support. I am indescribably impressed by the response of our journalistic sympathy, with dozens of publications covering the situation and a petition for support. This was the interim “thank you”. The main one is soon.”