by David Zenian
Washington -- It is often said that no news is good news, and that bad news travels fast, but both seem to be nothing but perceptions when it comes to news from Armenia.
While the world is bombarded daily with every detail of the situation in Somalia, Bosnia and the other regions of fragmented Yugoslavia, sometimes months go by without any mention of Armenia.
Is this because the situation in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabagh is less tragic than some of the other trouble-spots in the world? Not really. Is it because the media is against Armenia? Not really, either.
But the media has often demonstrated its inability to focus on more than one, or at best two issues at a time.
"Armenia, unfortunately, is way down on the media's list of priorities. At the moment, we are focusing on other parts of the world," a veteran Washington newspaper editor recently told a group of Armenians at a dinner party. "We are busy with Somalia and the former Yugoslavia ... If we draw up a story list, Armenia would fall all the way down the ladder of our priorities."
His advice: "Get television to focus on Armenia... Once you get television pictures from Armenia into the homes of millions of people in the United States, it will attract the attention of the print journalists, and the story will be elevated to national headlines."
And in recent weeks, the Armenia story started getting the attention it deserves, thanks in part to the pioneering efforts of the Armenian General Benevolent Union's Washington office of the Armenian Information Service.
It all started in mid-January with a carefully thought out and planned mission to Yerevan by a two-man professional television crew, hired by AGBU-AIS to gather enough footage to bombard television stations across the United States.
With only five days on the ground, the team squeezed footage out of every daylight hour, documenting desperate citizens cutting trees for firewood, people inching their way into what remained of Yerevan's crumbling public transportation, the heartbreaking conditions at local hospitals, children reading by candle light while parents fed their small wood burning stoves to keep the family warm as outside temperatures hovered at least a good dozen degrees below freezing.
Back in Washington, it was a race against time -- a battle to snatch a few precious moments of network television space away from high-impact domestic and international stories.
The strategy was in place, and so was AGBU-AIS's human-interest and powerful footage from Armenia.
It was now a question of timing, and a mid-morning call to the Washington office of AGBU-AIS from an American journalist in Moscow Friday, January 29, was enough of a signal to put the pre-planned "television offensive" into action.
The word from Moscow was that the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun reporters were back from Yerevan, and that their reports were going to appear in their respective newspapers over the weekend.
Within hours of the Moscow call, a special advisory was sent to news rooms of hundreds of television stations across the United States alerting them to the time and contents of the special AGBU-AIS satellite transmission of a fully-edited and narrated two-and-a-half minute report on Armenia.
Once the adequate notice was in place, the Armenia report was fed by satellite to an estimated 700 television stations across the United States accompanied by 20 minutes of extra footage to specially targeted markets in New York, Boston, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The AGBU-AIS Armenia footage was first shown on CNN World Report on January 31 - coinciding with the powerful Washington Post and Baltimore Sun articles.
This was followed by CNN Headline News, which is seen by millions of people across the United States and the world, including the editors of every major newspaper, radio station, magazine and other television stations.
"CNN was the vanguard in the coverage of the Gulf War and again the famine in Somalia. Getting Armenia on CNN can make a world of difference," said a media analyst.
By day's end February 1, millions of people at home in the U.S. and around the world had seen the AGBU-AIS produced footage showing the harsh winter conditions in Armenia. But that was not enough.
Armed with several copies of the same film, plus original and supplementary footage, AGBU-AIS Director David Zenian flew to New York for one-to-one meetings with the news editors of ABC, CBS and NBC.
The New York effort paid off when ABC News devoted nearly three minutes to Armenia in its main evening network newscast on February 4.
The Armenia pictures were now on the TV screens of millions of Americans and the campaign was already gathering momentum. It was only a matter of time for stations like NBC and CBS to join the bandwagon.
