Another Parliamentary Election Monitor is now available on the CRD/TI Election Monitor 2007 blog. This time it mainly deals with assurances from the Aleksan Harutyunyan that Public TV and Radio will be impartial in its coverage of the May vote.

Following on from various private television stations denying that high costs for political advertising were introduced to prevent opposition parties from taking out slots in the broadcast media, RFE/RL reports that the Chairperson of the managing board of Armenian Public Television and Radio, Alexsan Harutiunyan, has defended his station’s policy on pricing. He also took the opportunity to promise that his journalists will remain impartial during the election.

However, the results of a recent media monitoring study by the Caucasus Media Institute concludes that Public TV has some way to go before it can say that it has met such a promise.

The public television and radio channels, H1 and Public Radio demonstrated different trends in their coverage: on H1 there appears at first sight to be a high degree of access granted to non incumbent political parties who received 48% of overall coverage on the channel with the incumbent parties receiving 52%. […]

In reality in H1’s news coverage the incumbent parties received a very dominant share of coverage (75%) with non incumbent parties only receiving 25%. […]

[…] The public service broadcaster H1 has a special responsibility to ensure that its coverage provides a greater degree of balance between political parties and candidates and both political parties and the broadcaster should pro-actively engage in the campaign to ensure balanced coverage during the pre-campaign and campaign period itself.

The full post is here.