The presented interview features Giorgi Arobelidze, co-founder and journalist at Mautskebeli, a Georgia-based independent media outlet. Drawing on direct experience in Georgia's independent media sector, he offers a grounded perspective on the structural pressures shaping journalism, the current crisis facing independent outlets, and the transformation of the country's information and human rights environment.

The Georgian Parliament adopted amendments to the Broadcasting Law banning all foreign funding for broadcast media while expanding the Communications Commission's power to regulate content. What does this ban mean in practice for independent broadcasters, and is there a viable alternative funding model?

The ban has a precise target: the small number of outlets that managed to operate outside the centralized control of oligarchic and party capital. Those small and independent media outlets were the ones doing real journalism. They documented human rights abuses that pro-government media had no interest in covering. They produced investigative work exposing corruption and institutional failures that larger outlets buried. They gave a platform to regional communities that Tbilisi-centered media ignored entirely. International funding was also the lifeline for small regional outlets covering areas that would otherwise have had no independent journalism at all. Georgian television is otherwise divided between pro-government channels promoting nationalist and conservative narratives and opposition-aligned networks presenting themselves as the liberal, pro-European alternative. These blocs genuinely compete, but they share more ground than the visible conflict suggests. Neither has any interest in journalism that challenges politicized ownership structures, questions the governance and economic model, or covers communities outside the political mainstream.

The foreign funding ban does not disturb that polarization. It removes the outlets that were never part of it. Georgian Dream can manage a media landscape split between two competing blocs. What it cannot manage is journalism that operates entirely outside that binary. That is exactly what this law is designed to eliminate. As for alternatives, we are still searching, and there is no clear formula. Crowdfunding and audience donations are being tried across independent outlets, but they are uncertain and fragile in a small, economically constrained market where trust in media has been systematically undermined. Building an audience willing to pay for journalism takes time that many outlets may not have.

Between October 2024 and 2025, over 600 attacks against the press were documented, including assaults, arbitrary fines, arrests, threats, and accreditation suspensions. Does this scale of abuse indicate press freedom in decline, or outright collapse?

Georgian Dream came to power in 2012, promising to end the violence against journalists that defined the Saakashvili era. Unfortunately, as time proved, the current ruling government party chose the same authoritarian path, but through different instruments. For years, pro-government television and aligned politicians ran a deliberate campaign labeling critical journalists as foreign agents, enemies of the state, propagandists serving outside interests. Once that framing is established and repeated long enough, violence against those journalists stops requiring justification.

During the protests, journalists were beaten by police. Not caught in crossfire: targeted. Equipment was destroyed, press vests ignored, and accreditations suspended under public order justifications designed to make obstruction look procedural. The case of Mzia Amaglobeli illustrates how the legal system is deployed selectively, with a precision that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with who is being silenced and when. In the courts themselves, journalists now face the same recording restrictions that existed under Saakashvili. Access that was briefly opened has been quietly closed again, normalizing opacity in the institutions that most require scrutiny.

This process did not begin with the protests. It has been building for years, and it extends beyond journalists. The same machinery of restriction operates against ordinary people who organize and resist. The press is one target among several. What unites them is that they all represent voices the state would prefer not to exist in public. The defining feature of the current situation is impunity. When violence against journalists goes unpunished repeatedly, it stops being an exception and becomes a standard. Press freedom in Georgia is not eroding, rather being deliberately dismantled.

Self-censorship is widely regarded as one of the most corrosive forces in Georgian journalism today. How prevalent is it, and how do you draw the line between reasonable professional caution and quietly abandoning professional obligations?

Self-censorship is the hardest pressure to confront because it leaves no visible trace. In most Georgian outlets, the editorial agenda is not set by journalists. It is set by owners and advertisers. A television station carrying advertising from a major corporation will not produce journalism that damages that corporation, not because anyone issues that instruction, but because everyone inside the institution already knows it. The boundary is defensive internalization long before any specific story reaches a commissioning editor. This is how self-censorship actually works in Georgia. It is not primarily a political phenomenon. The latter is an economic one.

The same pattern extends to international coverage, where it takes a different form: not advertiser pressure, but the absence of political courage. Some Georgian outlets choose strategic silence on other forms of international violence, unable or unwilling to apply the same critical standard consistently. That selective vision is also a form of self-censorship, one that most outlets have already stopped recognizing as such.

The line between reasonable caution and self-censorship is not complicated in theory. A journalist exercises caution when verifying information, protecting sources, and ensuring accuracy. As for the Georgian case, the line is crossed when avoidance becomes systematic, when specific topics or economic interests are structurally protected from scrutiny, not by any explicit decision but by accumulated financial dependency.

Georgian law prohibits political parties from owning media, yet major networks largely defend the interests of owners with close ties to political leaders. Has political capture become so normalized that it is no longer treated as a crisis?

The formal prohibition on party ownership is, in practice, irrelevant. What matters is who owns the major broadcasters, what political and business relationships those owners maintain, and how those relationships shape editorial decisions. The economics tell the story clearly. No major television station in Georgia operates as a profitable business. These outlets lose money, and their owners spend significant sums to keep them running, not because television is a sound investment but because the capacity to shape public narrative is worth more than any return on investment. Unfortunately, the majority are not media businesses in any sense. They serve as a political infrastructure. Journalists working within those structures face implicit or explicit pressure to align their reporting with editorial lines they did not write and may not agree with. Some comply, and some leave, but very few have any structural protection to push back.

The most dangerous aspect is the normalization. When audiences assume that every major outlet is politically captured, and they largely do, trust in journalism collapses broadly. That creates a perverse situation: the outlets doing the most damage to journalistic credibility also benefit from the cynicism they generate, because a distrustful public is harder to mobilize around independent reporting. Genuine editorial independence in mainstream Georgian broadcasting is not currently a realistic condition. Treating capture as the ongoing crisis it actually remains the only honest starting point for any reform.

Television remains the primary news source for most Georgians, yet GPB faces persistent government interference, and the broader landscape is deeply polarized. What structural reforms would make Georgian television a genuinely independent public information space?

The polarization on screen is not the result of competing editorial philosophies. It is the result of competing ownership interests using broadcast media as a political asset. For the Georgian Public Broadcaster, the starting point is governance. Appointment procedures for the board and management must be transparent, merit-based, and structured to prevent any single political force from achieving dominant control. Crucially, this process cannot remain confined to political actors. Elections of board members need to involve civil society groups, professional associations, unions, academic institutions, and community organizations. Public broadcasting that is accountable only to political elites is not public broadcasting in any meaningful sense.

Political capture is not limited to the national level. The Adjara Public Broadcaster, which should serve one of Georgia's most distinct regions, has functioned as an extension of pro-government messaging rather than a genuine public service. Reform has to address every tier of public broadcasting, not just GPB. The Communications Commission, in its current form, is part of the problem. Dominated by ruling party appointees and now granted expanded powers to regulate content under the new Broadcasting Law amendments, it cannot be trusted with those powers before its own independence is rebuilt. The structural changes required are not technically complicated. The obstacle is entirely political.

Digital and online platforms have emerged as an alternative space for independent journalism. Can online media realistically fill the gap left by compromised television networks?

The shift is real, and it matters, but significance and substitution are different things. Television reaches the whole country. Online media reaches, disproportionately, urban and younger audiences already predisposed toward critical consumption. Older Georgians, people in rural areas, communities without reliable internet access: these populations are largely not being reached by independent digital platforms. That is a structural problem, not a content problem.

What online media offers is something television cannot easily replicate: editorial freedom and structural flexibility. Independent platforms have built coverage around labor struggles, social inequality, and grassroots movements that are systematically absent from mainstream media, not because they lack an audience, but because oligarchic ownership has no interest in platforming them. The common people's perspective is routinely excluded from oligarchic media. Independent digital platforms are, in some cases, the only place it appears.

The credibility question is real, too. The digital space contains serious independent journalism alongside significant quantities of misinformation, and distinguishing between them requires media literacy that Georgian audiences have not been systematically equipped with. Independent outlets constantly compete for legitimacy in an environment partly poisoned by content that carries the same format but none of the standards. The most resilient approach is building presence across multiple platforms rather than depending on any single one. Each platform has a different audience and a different vulnerability to algorithmic or political pressure. Distribution is not just a growth strategy. It is a resilience strategy. And as that audience grows, so does the responsibility to use the platform seriously, not just to challenge one government, but to scrutinize the broader political and economic structures that persist regardless of which party holds power.

With foreign grant funding now legally threatened and advertising dominated by politically aligned outlets, what sustainable funding models exist for independent media in Georgia?

The financial situation is genuinely existential. Foreign grants were the one funding source that allowed independent outlets to operate outside the domestic political economy. That source is now being removed deliberately, with full understanding of what it will produce.

Audience-based funding, through memberships, donations, and subscriptions, is the most structurally sound alternative because it creates direct accountability to readers rather than to political or business interests. But it has obvious limitations in a small, economically constrained market where trust in media has been systematically undermined. Building that relationship takes time, consistent quality, and a distinct identity that gives audiences a concrete reason to invest.

Across Georgia's regions, small independent outlets that spent years building local trust and covering communities that Tbilisi-centered media ignored are gradually disappearing. That loss is specific, tangible, and permanent. High-standard coverage fades, institutional knowledge disappears, and there is nothing to replace it. What independent media in Georgia needs right now, above all, is active support from audiences, from civil society, from anyone who understands what disappears when these outlets are gone.

Interview conducted by Luka Okropirashvili for Caucasus Watch