Armenia’s 2018 revolution marked a critical juncture for its path to democracy.

In April 2018, peaceful protests across Armenia, known as the Velvet Revolution, culminated in the resignation of the then Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. Sargsyan’s long-standing semi- authoritarian rule came to an end, and Armenians elected Nikol Pashinyan, a protest leader, opposition MP, and former journalist, as the new prime minister.

Since the revolution, the country has faced multiple crises. Armenia has been shaken by a rekindled war in Nagorno-Karabakh, an attempted coup d’état, hybrid warfare conducted by Azerbaijan, and multiple anti-government demonstrations. After the revolution, Yerevan started to break away from Moscow and turn towards the west with this shift reaching its peak in the last few months. Despite numerous challenges, Armenia has demonstrated significant progress towards consolidating democracy, being identified as one of the top 10 democratizers in the 2022 V-DM Democracy Report.

All these crises significantly impacted the state of press freedom in the country, and the path ahead to democracy and a free press remains fraught with challenges. Since the Velvet Revolution, press freedom has improved significantly, but the media environment has become increasingly polarized, mirroring the political and social polarization.

Central problems for press freedom include the lack of independence of the public broadcaster, restrictive legislation, and political polarization, with the latter deepening the distrust towards the media. According to the 2023 report on Freedom of Expression and Media Consumption 47% of the population does not trust the media. The interference in the media which takes place via economic and/or legal means is outsized and hampers media organizations’ financial and editorial independence.

IPI spoke with Nouneh Sarkissian, the director of the Media Initiatives Center, a civil society organization working on press freedom and media development, and Liana Sayadyan and Edik Baghdasaryan, Deputy Editor-in-chief and Editor-in-chief of Hetq, a major independent investigative newsroom based in Yerevan, about the state of press freedom in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution.

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