Pre-Election Broadcast Media Monitoring

The Yerevan Press Club has released its report monitoring pre-election broadcast media coverage for December ahead of next month’s presidential election in Armenia. The monitoring is financed by the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation-Armenia and the results for last month will hardly be a surprise to anyone.

The monitoring conducted 6-20 December focused on
17 politicians, but YPC identifies Serge Sargsyan, Levon Ter-Petrosian and Tigran Karapetian as the main presidential candidates dominating the airwaves on 7 television channels and 1 radio station.

77.7% of the aggregate airtime of Serge Sargsian was his coverage as an official. As such, he had received much more attention than Robert Kocharian (33,185 and 19,062 sec., respectively). In December in the references to Sargsian, similarly to the previous monitoring months, the neutral connotation continued to prevail (403 references), yet the Prime Minister took the first line in the list of 17 politicians in terms of positive pieces (79 versus 12 negative ones).

In December on the Armenian air the negative references to the first RA President Levon Ter-Petrosian continue to dominate. In other words, during the last month of 2007 the unprecedented phenomenon, recorded in November, continued when the share of neutral editorial coverage of an Armenian politician quantitatively fell behind that of negative: 103 negative references to Levon Ter-Petrosian versus 100 neutral ones and 4 positive ones. At the same time the share of negative ones in the total number of references has somewhat gone down in December - 49.8% versus 58.7% - in November.

The leader of the Popular Party Tigran Karapetian, who took the first line in terms of aggregate airtime on the channels studied in October-November, was this time the second. However, in December, too, this volume of coverage was ensured solely by one of the TV channels - “ALM”, owned by Tigran Karapetian himself: a bit more than 98% of the aggregate airtime he received, as well as all 18 positive references to the leader of the Popular Party, are accounted for by “ALM”.

The study does however note that the other six presidential candidates were not neglected and that coverage was mainly neutral. In order of popularity in terms of attention by the eight stations, they were Artashes Geghamian, Vahan Hovhannisian, Artur Baghdasarian, Vazgen Manukian, Aram Harutiunian, and Arman Melikian.

Obviously, as ALM did with Karapetian, politically affiliated stations such as Yerkir Media TV paid more attention to their own candidate although they did so more professionally than others.

Here the greatest editorial coverage was received by Vahan Hovhannesian, the presidential candidate nominated by “Dashnaktsutiun”. He is followed by two other candidates, the leader of “National Accord” party Aram Harutiunian and the leader of National Democratic Union Vazgen Manukian. Against the background of generally balanced coverage of politicians at focus, in the reporting of “Yerkir Media” two politicians stand out, with almost equal number of references and a big proportion of connotationally colored: out of 24 references to Vahan Hovhannesian 10 are positive, and out 26 references to Levon Ter-Petrosian 12 are negative. At the same time, unlike other TV and radio channels studied in December, the coverage on “Yerkir Media” of both Serge Sargsian’s and Robert Kocharian’s activities was purely neutral.

With some exceptions, what is most concerning about the broadcast media’s coverage of the presidential election is the tendency to attempt to define the vote in terms of two poles — Serge Sargsyan and Levon Ter-Petrossian. Given that some opposition activists, supporters and politicians believe that his candidacy favors Sargsyan, such a situation with the pro-government media is very interesting indeed.

However, it is also potentially damaging to the possibility for conducting free and fair elections in Armenia. Although the opposition media as well as Ter-Petrossian’s campaign team condemn such polls as being manipulated by the authorities, some surveys show Ter-Petrossian lacking any major support in society.

On the one hand, while this perhaps means that the negative PR on television and radio is working against Ter-Petrossian and favoring Sargsyan, other candidates who reportedly have a higher rating than the first president in opinion polls, but who do not have control over TV stations, are largely being ignored by the media.

Orinats Yerkir presidential candidate Artur Baghdasarian has already raised such concerns. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that attempts to define the presidential election as being a two-horse race between Sargsyan and Ter-Petrossian are actually coming not from within society, but from both the pro-government and pro-radical opposition broadcast, print, and online media.

When the election code kicks in with the pre-election campaign period on Monday it can only be hoped that the situation radically change. Then, weighting on pre-election campaign media monitoring will increase and be considered as more significant in terms of assessing the conduct of the vote, and all candidates will be allowed both free and paid time on nationally broadcast Public TV.