About GALA TV

GALA TV

GALA TV was an independent regional television station based in Gyumri, the capital of Shirak province in north-western Armenia and the country's second largest city. Its name was explained by its supporters as standing for Gyumri Alternative News Channel, and that word "alternative" defined its reputation: in a television landscape dominated by state and government-friendly national channels, GALA was widely recognised as one of the few independent voices in Armenian television broadcasting. The station was founded in 2005 by Chap LLC, a private Armenian company set up in 1999 with its registered office in Gyumri, and its owner and chief executive was Vahan Khachatryan. This profile is written largely in the past tense because GALA lost its place in terrestrial broadcasting when it was denied a digital broadcasting licence in December 2010, the decisive event in its history.

The verified record of GALA TV is unusually rich for an Armenian regional station, precisely because its difficulties became a test case for media freedom in Armenia. Its licensing history, a tax case that reached the European Court of Human Rights, and an unprecedented viewer fundraising campaign were all documented by the European Court, the Yerevan Press Club, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and international supporters. Those sources allow a fuller account than is possible for most regional channels, although routine details of its programme schedule and staffing were never documented as thoroughly.

Foundation and Licensing

Chap Ltd was set up in 1999 and established GALA TV in 2005 with the intention of broadcasting to the local region. On 23 February 2005 the National Television and Radio Commission granted Chap a licence permitting it to broadcast in Gyumri and the surrounding area for a period of seven years. GALA was one of four television stations operating in Gyumri at the time, alongside services that included Tsayg TV and Shant's local presence. Gyumri was a demanding place in which to build a station: the city was still recovering from the devastating earthquake of December 1988, and Shirak was among Armenia's poorer provinces, which made the local advertising market small from the outset.

Locally owned, GALA claimed an audience of about 50,000 in Shirak province. It soon became an alternative source of information for viewers who otherwise relied largely on the state channel or on private channels supportive of the government. That positioning, modest in itself, is what later brought the station into conflict with the authorities.

The Ter-Petrosyan Broadcast and the Tax Case

GALA's defining moment came in the autumn of 2007. The station broadcast, as a paid advertisement on 14 October 2007, a speech by former President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, delivered on 21 September 2007, in which he subjected Armenia's leadership to harsh criticism and which marked the start of his return to active politics. Neither the state channel nor other private stations aired footage of the speech; GALA and another, even smaller local station were the only broadcasters that agreed to carry it. GALA's owner, Vahan Khachatryan, said he had been warned by the National Commission on Television and Radio against airing Ter-Petrosyan's attacks on President Robert Kocharian, and that officers of the Gyumri branch of the National Security Service had told GALA to stop covering the former president's political activities. On 22 October 2007 Khachatryan issued a statement rejecting attempts by state agencies to exert pressure on the channel and affirming its editorial stance.

One week after that statement, a tax audit began. From 29 October to 12 November 2007 the State Revenue Service inspected Chap's accounts and, on 12 November 2007, issued a report stating that the company had underreported its tax liability by hiding income earned from advertising in 2005 to 2007, ordering it to pay 25,665,100 Armenian drams, approximately 51,000 euros, including surcharges and fines, within ten days. The report also alleged that Chap had failed to include service prices in invoices or keep records as required by broadcasting law, and that it had manufactured and sold fireworks without a government licence, and it questioned the company's use of the city television tower in Gyumri. Khachatryan described the accusations as false and absurd and denied that GALA could have had the advertising volume on which the tax calculation was based. Civic groups in Gyumri and Yerevan denounced the case as politically motivated, and hundreds of Gyumri residents rallied in support of the station in December 2007. The dispute over the television tower later reached Armenia's Court of Cassation, which in October 2008 annulled a lower-court ruling in the dispute between Gyumri municipality and Chap, allowing the company to continue using the city tower.

The Viewer Fundraiser of March 2008

The Gyumri division of Armenia's Administrative Court ruled on 19 March 2008 that Chap must pay the tax liability and fines, an amount exceeding 25 million drams, more than 81,000 US dollars at the time. Anticipating the ruling, GALA had already decided to try to raise the sum from the public. A televised fundraiser began on 17 March 2008 and ran to 25 March, and hundreds of residents visited GALA's offices to donate cash throughout the first day. Schoolchildren, pensioners, human rights advocates and supporters abroad contributed, and Khachatryan reported donations from Armenians elsewhere in the country and in the diaspora. The campaign raised about 26.4 million drams, reported by the AGBU at 26,458,500 drams, around 88,195 dollars, enough to pay the demand and keep the station on air.

The fundraiser was described at the time as the first action of its kind in Armenia, comparable in spirit to the annual telethon held abroad in support of the Armenia Fund. Supporters praised it as the arrival of genuinely public television in Armenia, while commentators also read its success as a mass statement that audiences wanted a real choice in broadcasting that was otherwise almost entirely controlled or influenced by the state. In January 2009 GALA announced that its activities would be monitored by an internal ombudsman, a function performed by Vahan Tumasian, head of a local development centre, a further sign of the station's effort to formalise its accountability to its audience.

The European Court Judgment

Chap Ltd took its case to the European Court of Human Rights, application number 15485/09. In its Chamber judgment in Chap Ltd v. Armenia, the Court held unanimously that there had been a violation of Article 6, paragraphs 1 and 3(d), of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair trial including the right to obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses. The tax report against Chap had been based in part on documents submitted by the head of the National Television and Radio Commission and on statements by heads of companies and individual businessmen, yet the Armenian courts refused Chap's request to summon those witnesses, finding their evidence irrelevant, even though the same evidence had been considered decisive for imposing the tax surcharges and fines. The European Court concluded that this restriction on the company's right to examine the witnesses against it was unreasonable. The judgment did not decide whether the tax demand itself was justified; it established that the proceedings by which it was imposed on the broadcaster were unfair.

Programming and Editorial Character

Verified detail about GALA's daily schedule is limited, and this profile does not invent programme titles that sources do not record. What the record does support is the station's editorial character: a local news and current-affairs service for Gyumri and Shirak, willing to carry opposition voices that national channels refused, and financed in significant part by the local advertising whose alleged concealment became the core of the tax case. Yerevan Press Club reporting from the 2008 presidential election period records GALA publishing its tariffs for pre-election promotion, 18,000 drams per minute excluding VAT, a small fraction of the rates charged by national channels in Yerevan, which illustrates both its participation in the normal commercial life of Armenian broadcasting and the modest scale of the regional advertising market on which it depended.

The Digital Licence Defeat

Armenia's transition to digital broadcasting restructured regional television around a single licensed channel per province. In the nationwide tender decided in December 2010, Chap LLC competed for the Shirak regional licence, competition number 23, against Tsayg LLC. GALA received 14 points out of the 42 needed to win the frequency, and the licence was awarded to Tsayg TV. The head of the National Commission, Grigor Amalyan, said that compared with Tsayg, GALA's bid provided for fewer Armenian-language programmes and that its financial and technical plans were weaker; no representative of GALA was present at the meeting. Under the digital framework, stations without a digital licence could not continue terrestrial broadcasting, and reporting by RFE/RL at the time grouped GALA with the regional stations that would have to discontinue their broadcasts in the existing analogue format at the end of the digitisation process. Analogue switch-off was postponed repeatedly and finally took effect from 26 October 2016, after which only the licensed regional channel in each province remained in the state multiplex.

Place in Armenian Media History

GALA TV matters in Armenian media history out of proportion to its size. It demonstrated, in 2007 and 2008, that a small provincial station could defy informal pressure from regulators and security bodies, survive a tax case its supporters regarded as retaliation, and be rescued financially by its own audience in a campaign without precedent in the country. It also demonstrated the limits of that survival: the same regulatory system that could not close GALA in 2008 could, and did, exclude it from the digital future in 2010 through a points-based tender whose criteria its bid did not meet. Media-freedom reporting on Armenia continues to cite GALA alongside A1+ as one of the emblematic cases of the period.

What the Record Does Not Show

In the interest of accuracy, this profile states its limits openly. No verified source consulted records GALA's full programme schedule, its staff numbers, a complete list of its presenters, or a precise final date on which every form of its broadcasting, terrestrial, cable or online, ceased. The station's terrestrial broadcasting ended as a consequence of the lost digital licence and the analogue switch-off; claims beyond that, including any later online activity, are not documented strongly enough to state as fact here and are therefore not asserted.

Legacy

The legacy of GALA TV is the standard it set for what a regional Armenian audience would do for a channel it regarded as its own. The March 2008 fundraiser remains the clearest documented case in Armenia of viewers directly financing a broadcaster's survival, and the European Court's judgment in Chap Ltd v. Armenia remains part of the legal record on fair proceedings against media companies in the country. For Gyumri and Shirak, GALA's years on air provided a locally owned, locally accountable source of news in a city whose national media attention usually arrived only at moments of crisis, and its story is still the starting point for any honest account of independent regional television in Armenia.