On March 11, the Media Development Foundation arranged a working meeting with representatives of the media entitled “Coverage of the Issues of Ethnic and Religious Minorities in the Georgian Media” in the Public Defender’s Office. The meeting was attended by the Public Defender of Georgia, George Tugushi.  

The Media Development Foundation has been monitoring the coverage of issues related to ethnic and religious minorities in the Georgian-language media outlets since January 1, 2010. The project is being implemented in the framework of the program “National Integration and Tolerance in Georgia” of the United Nations Association of Georgia (UNAG) and Eurasia Partnership Foundation (EFP) with the funding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The media monitoring includes seven national and eight regional newspapers and five TV stations.

The monitoring is both quantitative and qualitative. The aim of the quantitative monitoring is to find out how actively the Georgian media covers topics related to religious and ethnic minorities. The qualitative research aims at disclosing violations of international standards of covering minority issues by media outlets, in particular, the cases of discrimination and stereotyping. 

At the meeting, the foundation acquainted the representatives of the media and the NGOs interested in the issue with the intermediate results of the monitoring and discussed concrete examples of stereotyping and discrimination with them. The meeting participants agreed to exchange information on a permanent basis.  

According to the Media Development Foundation, the materials of the monitoring and the concrete examples serve not to criticize concrete media outlets but to identify concrete violations and facts of stereotyping, as well as to prevent repetition of similar facts in the Georgian-language media. 

http://www.ombudsman.ge/index.php?m=8&newsid=1186&lng=eng