Interesting Lies We Exposed in 2017

In an attempt to sum up the year 2017, Sut.am has highlighted the most interesting publications of the year.

Thus, we had a separate series about unfulfilled promises and programs. Not only did the Republican Party of Armenia fail to implement its 5-year program during 9 years, but it also did not fulfill its 2012 promises in the education sector, for instance. With regard to the pre-election programs of the political parties, Sut.am also addressed the unfulfilled program of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun, the unfulfilled promises of the Rule of Law Party.

This year we fixed how the asphalt “was filled” in the water, no buses and trucks were constructed, and the Vanadzor-Fioletovo railway turned into a myth.

Addressing the media disinformation, Sut.am introduced how the media outlets and the Embassy of Russia present the Turkish weapons as American ones, how “Sputnik” agency publishes contradictory materials in Armenia and Russia, how the media outlets prefer to be silent on Serzh Sargsyan’s 10% approval rating and participate in disinformation spread by him. Proclamation of a “new president” in Moldova by Armenian media was also noteworthy.

And there was no shortage of lies about the European Union. Perhaps the most ridiculous one was the series of publications claiming that the EU Ambassador Piotr Switalski has “called for legalization of drug use”. We also fixed that the closure of the nuclear power plant does not depend on the EU-Armenia agreement. We even had to admit that our programs coordinator Daniel Ioannisyan had misunderstood EU Commissioner Hahn’s statement, and, thus, had spread disinformation regarding the signing of EU-Armenia agreement.

Regarding Azerbaijani lies, it was revealed that Deputy of Ukraine’s Supreme Rada N. Savchenko did not support Azerbaijani infiltrators, Alexander Lapshin was not wanted by Interpol, and the Armenian “infiltrator” caught by Azerbaijan was not an infiltrator at all.

We also touched upon Eduard Sharmazanov’s lie regarding the Russian weapons. Sut.am addressed the 3 mistakes in Vardan Aramyan’s “academic” article, Vigen Sargsyan’s “census” and the lie regarding the 29.8% (in reality, it is 55%) poverty rate.

The team of Sut.am also addressed the “secret” luxuries of the National Security Service, Mihran Poghosyan’s Range Rover that had become a “Zaporozhets”, and distortion of reality by the police regarding the Jrarat incident. We also revealed that the Police have provided “gold” numbers to a number of public officials.

We also tried to find out the real number of thousands of RPA members. We introduced the danger that Nairit storage fire posed, and that the Ministry of Emergency Situations had failed to notice (we even made aerial photographs of the fire). We registered that the ridiculous information regarding “biological weapons” laboratories in Armenia reached Regnum this year and was widely spread. We also addressed YSU rector’s, Hayk Babukhanyan’s, Vigen Sargsyan’s and H1 Public TV’s attempts to defame activist students fighting against preservation of the right for military deferment.

We also wrote about some lies that have no direct relation to Armenia. For instance, we fixed that the media outlets faked the demand of the young man complaining against the heat in Tbilisi.

And of course, everyone must remember our publication about abuse of administrative power in favor of RPA by school and kindergarten principals. This publication was accompanied by scandals and court proceedings.  And after the parliamentary elections, we published a modest collection of camera shots in the polling stations that showed a number of cases of election irregularities.