July 3, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- The Armenian parliament has failed to pass a bill that would have placed severe restrictions on foreign broadcast media, particularly RFE/RL.

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/7/BB6F8DCC-A266-43BA-86D9-4DB560DBBD0A.html

To be sure, OSCE is not the only one criticizing.

OSCE Criticizes Planned Armenian Media Restrictions June 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- A top media freedom advocate has criticized proposed amendments to Armenia's legal code that would
severely restrict foreign broadcast media.

Miklos Haraszti, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe's media freedom representative, called on Armenian
lawmakers not to adopt the amendments, saying they
were incompatible with OSCE commitments to media freedoms.

Under the draft amendments, Armenian broadcasters
would have to pay a sharply increased fee for each aired program made by a
foreign media organization.

The legislation would also ban Armenian Public
Television and Radio (HHHR) from retransmitting programs of foreign
broadcasters.

RFE/RL's Armenian Service primarily relies on HHHR's
radio frequencies to air its daily news programs across Armenia.

Haraszti said that as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
is currently the only foreign media outlet using the HHHR frequency, the
adoption of the amendments "would amount to a ban on their programs in
Armenia."

Armenia: Government Moves Against Foreign Broadcast Media June 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Armenia's National Assembly is due today to debate government draft amendments that could end Armenian-language broadcasts of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Among the amendments is a proposal to ban, or put a heavy fine on, retransmission of foreign-broadcast programs.

The two draft amendments sent to the parliament late on June 26 were swiftly condemned by local media rights groups and top opposition leaders.

(more) http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/06/e668c742-c73d-4df6-ba43-f6b26db6ac9c.html

art imitates life

Two nights ago I finished watching a documentary called Gaza Strip, which was recommended to me by a friend. The doc was filmed during the second intifada in 2001, and the camera mostly follows children in east Gaza, where many were wounded and killed by Israeli soldiers- making the devastation of the conflict all the more difficult to swallow. The film particularly follows one 13 year old, Mohammed Hajezi, and his friends, who are a part of "a new generation of Palestian boys who risk their lives hurling stones over barbed wire fences at Israeli tanks, in symblic gesture of resistance to the occupation."

Upon turning off the DVD player and flipping back to tv mode- which is permanently set to CNN- imagine my suprise to see images of the very same streets in Gaza with headlines about the anarchy resulting in a dissolved Palestinian unity government. It hurts me to think that perhaps some of the bemasked faces I was seeing on the live-feed, today, in 2007, could be the very same young teenage boys I had just watched immortalized in Longley's film 6 years ago, now grown into men with unresolved frustrations ceaslessly fueled by the realities of the life they dealt with in childhood. When will children be able to live as children...

Tribeca!

Congratulations to Vardan and Bars Media!!!

Tribeca Film Festival 2007:
Best New Documentary Filmmaker
http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/tff-aj-2007-awards.html

http://www.warandpeacefilm.com/

I'd like to think that as a Researcher in the credits of this film, I share part of the award ;-)

"The revolution will not be televised...it will be You-Tubed"

It continues :)

I'll just copy and paste from Onnik's report from Transparency International's blog for now since he summed it up so extremely well. Barring any further internet and technical difficulties, my video footage from the event will be up soon...

It’s been included in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2004, but it’s unlikely that more than a handful of people in Armenia know what a flash mob is. It’s even less likely that anybody actually cares, but nonetheless, history was made in Yerevan today when Sksel a, an informal grouping of civil society activists working to activate youth in time for the May parliamentary election, organized Armenia’s first ever flash mob.

In modern usage, flash mob describes a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disperse. They are usually organized with the help of the Internet or other communications networks.

The term has also been applied to distributed mobs, who use similar means to coordinate sudden large scale simultaneous actions in multiple locations. An example of such an action is the widespread use of mobile phones in the 2005 civil unrest in France to coordinate widespread social disruption.

Usually, the organizers of such events don’t tell participants what exactly will happen and why, and today’s event was no exception. Apart from a non-descriptive advert posted on various blogs such as this one, no other details were announced prior to the
event. Even so, after two previously successful events, enough interest was aroused to attract around 150-200 young Armenians to turn up at the park opposite Yerevan’s Conservatory.

Of course, most of those attending were also present at Sksel a’s Barekendan and Կես կատակ կես լուրջ ցուՅցահանդես events, but for Armenia even this is impressive given the level of apathy and non-involvement in society. However, when interviewed by one journalist, a 15-year-old girl said she had attended all three events so far, but wasn’t too sure what this one was hoping to achieve. Still, perhaps that’s not too surprising.

Standing at the corner of each intersection leading into the roundabout opposite Yerevan’s Opera House, as well as circling the grassy area in its center, each participant stood with a newspaper reading separate articles of their choice out aloud. Also wearing hats made out of newspapers, the sight and sound of that alone was surreal and unexpected enough for Armenia even in this day and age.

As were leaflets handed out asking “are you satisfied with yourself, or with the person next to you?,” “are you guilty?,” and “are you afraid, or don’t you care?”

Tamar Palandjian, Youth Program Coordinator at the Civil Society Institute (CSI) says that the purpose of the event was straightforward enough. Under banners that asked “Shall We Read?” the event was aimed at encouraging the population to read newspapers. With all of the television stations under direct or indirect government
control, the only plurality of opinion and diversity of information can be found in the print media.

Even so, newspaper circulation remains low with actual readership even lower, and even the most popular of papers can publish only a few thousand copies each day. Nevertheless, if the purpose of the event was to get people to take interest in the press, then the flash mob achieved its goal. Cars and public transport passing by stopped to take copies of the newspapers participants were handing out until the police asked the organizers to stop in case traffic was disrupted.

Once again, there were even a few members of the Diaspora in attendance, including representatives of two significant organizations albeit there in a personal capacity, and most observers were overall impressed with the new approaches taken by Sksel a with regards to activating society, and in particular youth. However, many still remain unsure as to where Sksel a is heading, and whether it’s ultimate goal is clear enough.

One participant attending for the first time, for example, said that she wanted to be involved with something, but wasn’t entirely sure what. Still, such events might help direct young Armenians in that sense, and it was interesting to see that after the initial action itself, participants were encouraged to cut out those articles they found most interesting to paste to a large board erected in the park.

“They’re making their own newspaper,” remarked one young Armenian from the Diaspora. “I wonder what it says?”

More events are planned in the very near future.

World Press Photo of the Year 2006

Do you remember last summer?

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=823&Itemid=146

changing the world, one letter at a time

Haha...is it egotistic to think i had something to do with this ;-)


http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/03/11/france.chirac.reut/index.html

POSTED: 0206 GMT (1006 HKT), March 11, 2007

STORY HIGHLIGHTS:

• NEW: Chirac urges nation to reject "extremism, racism, anti-Semitism...rejection"
• NEW: Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen calls Chirac departure "a great joy"
• NEW: Chirac says he would have liked to have modernized France more rapidly
• Nicolas Sarkozy, Segolene Royal, Francois Bayrou lead contenders for president

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- President Jacques Chirac announced on Sunday he would not seek re-election next month after 45 years in frontline politics and made a final appeal to French voters to shun extremism.

Chirac, 74, has served as head of state since 1995 and leaves behind a checkered record that consists as much of symbolic gestures as concrete policies.

This article is first on this list of "Top Stories" in the Latest News section of CNN international's home-page and was reported among the headlines of World News as I watched this morning.

Letter to CNN

After days of bitching to my roomate and anyone else who will listen, I tried complaining directly to the source.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am disappointed with the complete lack of coverage regarding the French presidential elections which are now almost ONE-month away.

Unfortunately, I could fathom why domestic US CNN may not carry much content on anything not of direct interest to the general American public. However, as a US citizen living and working abroad, I watch CNN INTERNATIONAL frequently and am very disappointed to have seen not one segment or report on this critical election happening in a very important EU state.

Instead, CNN International IS saturated with news of the US's 2008 election...still TWENTY-ONE months away.

My French friends tell me that their country is in the midst of a serious identity crisis and these elections could prove pivotal for the future.

As Chirac held the post of Prime Minister and then Mayor of Paris before taking Presidential office, my friends in their 20s have not yet lived a day when Jacques Chirac was not a dominant figure in political life. This is France's first chance in over two decades to have a change in leadership.

My friends also describe candidate Sarkozy as "the French George Bush." In the meantime candidate Bayrou labels himself as the French version of a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair.

If even these comparisons aren't enough to make our American-centric news agencies pay some attention, I'm not sure what is.

If CNN International truly intends to report global news, I implore you to report much more about elections happening outside the US.

Thank you.

Sent today via http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?37. Send one, it's fun.

In the meantime, here's at least one article worth reading about France's ignored Presidential race.

Free Media? What's that?

Screening the Message: Ruling on Parliamentary broadcast sharpens debate about TV bias
ArmeniaNow

A weekly live broadcast of questions and answers in the National Assembly has been ruled unconstitutional by Armenia’s Constitutional Court.

The court said that Public Television could not be obliged to show the four-hour broadcast because it would contravene laws separating the operation of television from government control.
[...]
Opposition politicians also criticized the ruling, but suggested that it was linked to the forthcoming parliamentary and presidential elections in 2007 and 2008 respectively. They argue that the weekly broadcast provides one of the few opportunities for opposition parties to get their messages across to the electorate without interference from pro-government TV stations.
[...]
Public TV, known as the First Channel, plans to summarize the
question-and-answer session, rather than allow unedited broadcast, selecting the questions considered most important to the viewers.

and my favorite part:

Alexan Harutyunyan the chairman of the Public Television and Radio Council, considers the court’s ruling to be fair. He says it helps to improve the general quality of the legislation governing media by bringing it closer to conformity with European standards.

what???

Watchdogs

Recently had an internal debate with myself about the role of media, of the effect that barrages of negative and apocolyptic news has on the psyche of a society (ie- the "culture of fear" firmly taking root in the US), about constantly drumming the beat of warning without offering constructive solutions... And then I read this article.

In the west, Politkovskaya's honesty brought her a measure of fame and a string of awards, bestowed at ceremonies in hotel ballrooms from New York to Stockholm. At home, she had none of that. Her excoriations of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, ensured isolation, harassment, and, many predicted, death. 'I am a pariah,' she wrote in an essay last year. 'That is the result of my journalism through the years of the second Chechen war, and of publishing books abroad about life in Russia.'

Despite the fact that Politkovskaya was articulate, attractive and accomplished, she was barred from appearing on television, which is the only way the vast majority of Russians get news. To the degree that a living woman could be airbrushed out of post-Soviet history, she had been. 'People call the newspaper,' she wrote, 'and send letters with one and the same question: "Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need to know this?"' She provided an answer as much for herself as for any reader: 'I'm sure this has to be done, for one simple reason: as contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won't work. So I want you to know the truth. Then you'll be free of cynicism.'

So, thanks to the Guardian for publishing this very intriguing in depth two-part article (really worth the read) and confirming what I deeply always believed. In countries like these- where information is not clear and poorly disseminated, media outlets are controlled, facts are dubious, and unfounded conspiracy theories are rampant- it is all the MORE important for journalists, and researchers and organizations like Transparency to report the facts and the results of their research- even if it is disconcerting and frightening.