Journalist Anna Israelyan of the “Aravot” daily regularly publishes a series of articles on violations involved in the packages of TV companies which were recognized as winners of the competition of broadcasting licenses for TV channels at the end of last year.
According to the journalist these violations have been ignored by the National Committee of Television and Radio (NCTR) providing the licenses.
Meanwhile, the journalist considers, NCTR had a biased approach towards “A1+”. On December 16, 2010, when NCTR opened the competition packages and it turned out that “A1+” was deprived of the right to dispose a channel for the 13th time, Anna Israelyan decided to by all means investigate all of the tenders.
“Competition process of previous years proved that packages of other TV companies, too, would certainly involve such false documents as were revealed by NCTR within “A1+” package,” says Israelyan.
And the journalist’s investigations succeeded to prove it.
Israelyan began to regularly publish series of articles entitled “Such are the winners’ tenders”, as well as photos of documents certifying violations in the “Aravot” daily, as well as to post them on her recently opened personal blog.
Journalist Anna Israelyan of the “Aravot” daily regularly publishes a series of articles on violations involved in the packages of TV companies which were recognized as winners of the competition of broadcasting licenses for TV channels at the end of last year.
According to the journalist these violations have been ignored by the National Committee of Television and Radio (NCTR) providing the licenses.
Meanwhile, the journalist considers, NCTR had a biased approach towards “A1+”. On December 16, 2010, when NCTR opened the competition packages and it turned out that “A1+” was deprived of the right to dispose a channel for the 13th time, Anna Israelyan decided to by all means investigate all of the tenders.
“Competition process of previous years proved that packages of other TV companies, too, would certainly involve such false documents as were revealed by NCTR within “A1+” package,” says Israelyan.
And the journalist’s investigations succeeded to prove it.
Israelyan began to regularly publish series of articles entitled “Such are the winners’ tenders”, as well as photos of documents certifying violations in the “Aravot” daily, as well as to post them on her recently opened personal blog.
Competition packages of TV companies were provided her by NCTR on the basis of her written application.
At first, without any obstacles Israelyan was afforded an opportunity to study the documents, however, immediately after the third publication, that is, after publishing a document with obvious violations regarding financial liabilities, NCTR president Grigor Amalyan refused to no longer provide the journalist financial contracts reasoning that those concern to a third party.
Although now Israelyan has copies of all the competition packages, however, she has not been allowed to photograph numerous financial documents.
“For example, I saw that financial documents, advertising contracts in one of the competition packages were not sealed and signed the way they should have been, but I was not allowed to photograph them. But I have seen them and I[[wysiwyg_imageupload:83:height=255,width=411]] know. I can confidently say that there is almost no TV company which submitted a tender with perfect documentary.”
As for regional TV companies, the journalist noted that tenders in this case are merely copied from each other, which also have remained unnoticed. According to Israelyan there may be two reasons for NCTR to overlook these violations.
She says, “If they have read those packages then I exclude for they have not seen the violations. If I alone see that some of the packages are copied from each other word by word, how 8 of them could miss it. That is the missing could have one excuse only – political expedience.”
The journalist beleives that her studies will not give any result since the competition process is over and the “train has already left” but she considers that her detections could contribute to the change of public opinion.
“Initiating this unique monitoring I wanted to show that, nevertheless, NCTR had a biased attitude particularly towards “A1+”, aiming to once again hamper the broadcasting of “A1+”, and I think I achieved my goal.”
Israelyan also has taken an interview regarding violations and detections revealed by her from the NCTR president Grigor Amalyan who categorically has denied the violations presented by the journalist.
Source: JNews.am