On February 22, students in the American University of Armenia’s (AUA) Media and Society course attended a lecture by journalist Sohrab Ahmari, founder and editor of Compact Magazine and the U.S. columnist for The New Statesman. The event was made possible by AUA’s Media Lab and The Armenia Project.

After detailing his path to journalism, Ahmari delved into two central topics: the crisis of misinformation in the West — an issue which also affects Armenia — and Armenia’s struggle to tell its story on the international stage. Regarding the former subject matter, Ahmari pointed to the rise of Twitter and similar social media platforms that often disseminate decontextualized media and have become a primary source of news for the public, rather than established newspapers and magazines with strict standards and guardrails against false information.