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The Monitoring Results on Armenian Media Tolerance

The Caucasus Institute has recently completed the project “Monitoring of Tolerance of Armenian Media”, the results of which were presented to the public. According to the project manager Nina Iskandaryan, the project goal was to identify major problems in the field of tolerance of the Armenian media. “Before practicing, we need to know what we deal with, whether we have a problem with the lack of tolerance, what are the problems, if any, because, before healing, it is necessary to make a diagnosis. Our project was aimed at studying the situation of tolerance in the Armenian media. Are there any manifestations of intolerance, if any,” notes the project manager of the Caucasus Institute Nina Iskandaryan. Within the scales of the project, according to Nina Iskandaryan, intolerance appears as a manifestation of hostility towards different groups of society who have the right to exist. The project manager calls for tolerance not the bandits, not criminals, but social groups, ethnic groups (peoples), regional groups (Gavar residents, Aparan residents), age-sex groups (women, men, old people, etc.). “Our task was to identify which groups precisely intolerance is addressed to in the Armenian media. We had expectations - some ethnic groups (Turks, Azerbaijanis and other peoples), women, political intolerance (one thing is to criticize, what was said by a representative of this or that party, and quite another thing to mock him/her and create a negative image of an entire group). But as a result we received quite a different picture.” According to Iskandaryan, 10 print and electronic media were studied at the first phase of the project, taking into account analytical articles and editorials mainly. “In the print media intolerance was mostly met not towards social and ethnic, but towards public institutions, and public servants (police, border control, etc.).” According to the project manager, there are different kinds of intolerance: when a journalist wants to specifically promote hatred towards one or another group, and vice versa, when intolerance is unconscious. “It is easier to fight against the latter, in this case, the journalist must adhere simply to journalistic ethics,” says Nina Iskandaryan. “In the Armenian media purposeful expression of intolerance is rare. The most common types of intolerance are mockery, abusive language and insults. This is a matter of style, form, trivial journalistic ethics, which is solved very simply at the level of journalistic professionalism. We did not find professionally prepared articles containing intolerance.” Not only negative intolerance (when someone is insulted), but also positive intolerance has been studied. According to Iskandaryan, positive intolerance is when a group is pushed forward at the expense of other groups, when a positive image of a group is created at the expense of other groups. In the Armenian media such group is - Armenians (we Armenians, Armenia, we are ancient, great ...). “Such articles recalling Armenians as a group are of great number. Here there is an obviously pictured problem. In the Armenian media the inflated self-esteem of Armenians is combined with underestimated one, sometimes even in the same context. " The second phase dealt with the study of tolerance in television. “Here, too, as in the print media the main type of intolerance is mockery and abusive language. And the target of mockery in television is a group which we call “ordinary citizen”. According to our sampling, ordinary people are insulted most of all. The man for whom there is television, the audience - is the main target of mockery, rudeness. There are two possible explanations: on the one hand television is not for the audience, but for advertisers and owners, on the other hand the audience likes it. That is, in this case it is reckoned that the audience likes to be spoken about that way.” “However it should be noted that on the basis of the previous studies it turned out that TV media in Armenia is much more tolerant of print and electronic ones, due to a number of objective factors, particularly the lack of censorship in the print media,” stressed the project manager.

Source: JNews.am, Caucasus Media News

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