Amid a growing awareness of Western-style civil rights in Georgia, journalists are wrestling with a thorny question: where is the line between reporting and social activism? A recent tussle in the Georgian capital Tbilisi between police and protesters illustrates the trouble that many have in answering.
Twenty-three-year-old Ani Chankotadze was holding both a camera and a poster on Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue when policemen dragged her away and pushed her into a vehicle during the rowdy dispersal of a May 1 demonstration for workers’ rights. Chankotadze, a reporter for the privately owned news weekly Liberali, was not at the rally as a journalist, but, rather, as a founding member of Laboratory 1918, a youth group that organized the protest. [Editor’s note: Liberali formerly received funding from the Open Society Georgia Foundation, part of the Open Society Foundations network. EurasiaNet.org operates under the auspices of the New York-based Open Society Foundations, a separate part of that network].
Chankotadze’s arrest, along with that of TV reporter Zviad Khujadze, there as a correspondent, prompted an outcry. The Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, a watchdog group, urged the government to “avoid interference in media representatives’ professional activities.” Other non-governmental organizations echoed that call. In response, Interior Minister Irakli Gharibashvili asserted at a press briefing that police had been unable to tell who was a journalist and who was not.
It is not rare for Georgian journalists to swap pens for posters. Maintaining a clinical distance from the news does not always rank as a primary professional obligation, but it is something that fuels discussion in media circles, including in Chankotadze’s newsroom.
Liberali Editor-in-Chief Shorena Shaverdashvili, also a social activist, said she struggled to come up with a response to her reporter’s arrest. “Of course, we wanted to help Ani, but at the same time we could not demand her release on the grounds of her being a reporter because she was not there in the capacity of a reporter,” Shaverdashvili said. “This put us in a bind.”
Fellow Liberali reporter Giorgi Gogua, who covered the rally for the magazine, said he tried to prevent Chankotadze’s arrest by telling police she was a journalist, even though he knew she was there as a demonstrator. “I think it was a mistake that Ani went there as a participant,” Gogua commented. “At the end of the day, you need to decide: are you a journalist or an activist?” [Editor’s Note: Giorgi Gogua was a former student in a new media class taught by Giorgi Lomsadze at Tbilisi State University].
That decision is not so easy for Georgian reporters to make. As elsewhere in the South Caucasus, journalists, confronted by perceived violations of civil liberties, often see no contradiction between their professional calling to report the facts objectively and their growing willingness to fight for their rights as citizens.
Chankotadze believes that the traditional American media concern about avoiding conflicts of interest detracts from what she defines as the main role of journalism – serving the public interest. “Protecting human dignity is a higher principle for me than a professional standard,” Chankotadze said. “Is not the goal of better serving society why we came up with journalism standards in the first place?”
Media ethics advocate Zviad Koridze, a board member of the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, counters that journalism standards anticipate that a journalist will act first and foremost as a journalist. “A reporter who goes to a rally to demand a leftist labor code, who assumes to know better what’s good or bad for the audience, ends up short-changing the readers on the plurality of ideas and takes,” Koridze said.
Koridze believes that Georgia’s ongoing struggle with democratization contributes to crossovers between activism and journalism. “Modern journalism is based on liberal democratic values, so journalists, by definition, subscribe to these values,” Koridze said. “But when these values are not firmly established in a country, reporters oftentimes feel the need to fight for them and also tell their readers of the advantages and the importance of these values.”
Though generally viewed as more liberal than its South Caucasus neighbors, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia earned only a “partly free” ranking from the Washington, DC-based democratization watchdog group Freedom House in 2012. Politicization of media, the lack of an independent court system and electoral abuses remain persistent concerns.
Liberali reporters have been in the vanguard of those journalists who believe that they need to push for change. While praised for their investigative journalism, the periodical’s reporters and editor are often participants and organizers of rallies in support of minority rights or against police abuse.
Liberali Editor Shaverdashvili says she understands the perils of reporters getting personally involved in the news, and does not think that personal views should be “reflected in your professional work.”
But, inevitably, Georgia’s political environment pushes reporters toward activism, she said. “I got pulled into activism from the moment I began publishing the magazine” in 2009, Shaverdashvili claimed. “We could not get public information, we were shunned by advertisers as they feared association with a magazine that criticized the government ... so, to make a quality publication work, I had to do something to change the environment around us.”
But whether such activism will make a long-term difference for Georgia’s media health is open to doubt. Like its overall civil-rights situation, the country’s media status remains “partly free,” according to Freedom House.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a freelance journalist based in Tbilisi.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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