Tamar Chergoleishvili to Lodge Complaint to Maestro’s Self-Regulatory Body

Tamar Chergoleishvili, Editor-in-Chief of the Georgian weekly magazine Tabula, is going to lodge a complaint to the self-regulatory body of the TV Company Maestro.

According to the statement published on the website of the edition the complaint touches upon the announcement for the program Arguments. The announcement is aired by Maestro TV several times a day and wrongly presents Tamar Chergoleishvili’s opinion, which she had voiced in the same program of April 2, 2012.

Speaking in the program Chergoleishvili criticized Irakli Alasania who had declared mistrust to the March 2012 NDI survey results published few days earlier; Alasania alleged that scared population is hiding truth from the research organizations.

According to the editorial office, the program authors cut out just one phrase of Chergoleishvili’s statement so that she is insulting the population instead criticizing the member of the Coalition Georgian Dream.

The Tabula’s editor-in-chief believes that Maestro is intentionally harming her reputation and breaching the Code of Conduct for Broadcasters, namely, paragraph 9 of Article 14 which states “When editing interviews, recorded material, including an archive material, broadcasters should not distort a respondent’s words or mislead the audience in any other way by video or audio manipulations, by changing the meaning of the questions asked, or using shots out of context.”

Reporting to Media.ge Maestro TV Director General Ilia Kikabidze refrained from commenting on the accusation voiced by the Tabula’s editor-in-chief stating that Chergoleishvili has not yet lodged a complaint to the TV Company.

Media.ge