The public has the right to know who provides the information that is important to the public so that it can polish the information or compare it with information that it receives from other sources. This is what President of Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan told journalists on 15 April, talking about the need to reveal the real owners of media outlets.

“We Armenians remember very well how the new authorities of Armenia would immediately redistribute media outlets after coming to power, but we won’t see this happen now, even if we take public television, which could have become pro-government, but didn’t. I hope this is reinforced in the near future,” he stated.

Navasardyan stressed the fact that when an oppositional group or figure says a particular media outlet is its belonging, it doesn’t mean that there will be punitive measures. On the contrary, the media outlet will be more protected because any assault against a particular media outlet will immediately be politicized.

President of the Committee on Defense of Freedom of Speech Ashot Melikyan stressed that transparency of the real owners of media outlets is generally a necessary condition for a democratic society. “Transparency is a necessary condition for a democratic society, and the fact that the process is going on is natural because if we want media outlets to work with their audiences by following the rules of a fair game, then transparency is a major condition,” he stated.