Yes and no! In the years between 1921, when the Reds came to power in Sakartvelo, and 1989, when the Soviet regime collapsed, generations of Georgian journalists used to be part of the Soviet cohort of men and women of letters. At that weird time and place of work and living, Georgian journalism could not have been a pronouncedly national public service concerned with writing and reporting. It was a Soviet socialist job to do, and if one wanted to be any different from this, one would never be given a chance to function as a columnist or a newscaster. Only an obedient servant of the communist political power was entitled to earn money using his or her journalistic ear, eye, talent, brain, and pen.
Yes, even the Soviet journalistic ‘automatons’ were expected to be talented and alert to the ongoing matters around them. It was as if, out of the blue, we jumped from the Soviet type of restrictions into the free modus operandi of depicting life as it was. It should also be noted with a sense of pride and moral satisfaction that the old generation of experienced Soviet-Georgian journalists momentarily ‘changed skin’ and started walking in step with the new times of freedom and democracy. The younger generation of our journalists easily picked up the new principles and attitudes and started fulfilling their journalistic obligations with no less skill and enthusiasm than their Western colleagues.
Newspaper, radio, and television storytelling became so westernized that the only difference between them and us was merely linguistic. Everything else—whether technical, emotional, or content-wise—was exactly the same. I remember, at the end of the 1980s of the bygone century, when I returned from America and brought with me American TV stories I had produced there, they amazed viewers so much that, the moment they were on the air, transport in the streets stood still because people were watching them avidly. Soon, most of the news stories in Georgia became so highly qualitative that nobody remembered my American ones. Indeed, the transformation in the world of media was huge and momentary in this country. Probably, the same kind of metamorphosis was taking place in the rest of the former Soviet republics.
But behold, nobody can say whether Georgian journalism, along with the change of times—i.e., rushing from socialism straight toward wild capitalism—became impartial, objective, unbiased, caring, concerned, and disinterested. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to state that the most scathing ailment afflicting our journalism currently is not being disinterested.
To experiment, just go ahead and switch on the prime-time news, or check any time slot for that matter—you will always find the journalist expressing his or her interpretation of the news instead of the news itself. Almost every journalist in this country, whether of the leftist or rightist pattern, tilts to one side or the other. They usually take positions and often fail to uphold journalistic objectivity—the most appreciated and indispensable quality practiced around the world.
It goes without saying that our journalists should not behave as lifeless robots like their hatched-in-one-philological-incubator Soviet colleagues, repeating like parrots what they were told or sent to read. Well, it is said that columnists and editorial writers—the authors of reviews, as well as radio and television commentators with special knowledge and proficiency—are freer to express their individual opinions, and still, the social and political radicalism, fortified by the insurmountable chasm within our society, torn apart between liberal democracy and realpolitik-based conservatism, heavily affects their journalistic behavior on the air and in print.
And this is perilous, keeping the country from real-time development in every possible respect. This kind of journalism has the effect of poison, and the resulting intoxication may very well be irretrievable. Most of the viewers, readers, and listeners are regular people who use journalistic services with an egregiously gullible attitude, whereas the journalists themselves are far from being naïve in what they are doing and saying. Thus, the influence of a word, expressed in any medium, is immeasurable on our society. Hence, the paradigm of political behavior we are enjoying almost on an everyday basis.
Conclusively, thanks to the way media functions in this land, we, the people, have to meet challenges like misinformation—also known as fake news—frequent and flagrant breaches of privacy, feeding audiences various conspiracy theories, a nauseating overload of content, fierce competition in the field, declining public trust, the inevitable impact on mental health, and even the illegal spread of sensitive data.
Couldn’t all this trigger the question of whether our national journalism is a good thing to embrace—or something toxic to drop like a hot potato and never pick up again?
OP-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
