By Elene Tvauri and Gvantsa Bedoshvili
In many countries there are challenges regarding the development of democratic media systems. The solutions however cannot be found only on the national level, but they have to be international. To learn more about the challenges and perspectives of media and journalism in Georgia members of the Media Dialogue network had a meeting with Zviad Pochkhua, the president of the Independent Association of Georgian Journalists.
Mr. Pochkhua has an experience of working in the media industry for over 20 years and during this period, an important part of his job was supporting independent media development. Therefore, the main focus of the meeting was the situation of media independence and the important decisions which must be made in this field.
The situation in Georgia is not the best: There is no independence, the media market is occupied by the control of the private companies. That is why it is on the verge of collapse. The reason for this is that nowadays everyone prefers to get information from digital and social media, so broadcast media lags behind. As Mr. Pochkhua said: “there are very few prospects to develop independent media and maybe thanks to approaches like the Media Dialogue project, journalism will survive”.
The main problem of the lack of independence is economic resources. For that reason, the government, politicians, or people who have the financial resources or fame can force media to spread fake news, disinformation in order to reach their goal. In that case, having more organized channels by helping other countries would change the situation for better. It needs investments, but it is not easy to interest them, because we can’t show benefits in making channel. Even media companies avoid to open TV channels in Georgia, because achieving the goal of having a successful channel, needs spending about millions of US-Dollars. No one in this industry in Georgia is able to do that. On one hand, they do not have the money and on the other hand, they know that the advertisement market is occupied by other companies and investing would not make sense in this case.
and Serhiy Tomilenko, president of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine
It is not surprising that digital media is used to spread fake news. We see one story written in completely different ways, which makes it difficult to find out the truth. Sometimes even professional journalists have to face this, because rather than telling the complete truth, they decide to sugarcoat stories and make them appear nicer than it actually is. This happens because the education level of Georgia is not high. As Mr. Pochkhua said, about 80 percent of journalists do not have enough abilities to do their job, for instance, some of them do not know how to write an article, they just rewrite interviews.
The representatives of the Media Dialogue network and Mr. Pochkhua also talked about the solutions. Mr. Pochkhua said that few years ago the idea of having an international network of media was developed. For example, there would be agencies from Moldova, Armenia, Belarus etc. which can be more independent than local agencies, because having control over international structures is difficult for governments. But still until now we have no such organizations, because Georgian law prohibits the existence of channels in ownership of foreigners.
As we can see, at the moment there are more problems than solutions. The only thing all countries can do is to work together against the same problem. That is the reason why the Media Dialogue project is carrying on with many more meetings, events, ideas and discussions.
