The Newspaper “Spektri” Responds to the Article of Gela Mtivlishvili

Roman Apakidze

The editorial staff of the newspaper “Spektri” responded to the article of our regional correspondent Gela Mtivlishvili. The name of the article was “How Print Media is Restricted in the Regions”. The article was about the pressure the government is putting on the regional media outlets. The journalist wrote  that the government was using the method of intimidation against the critical journalists and winning them over by  offering jobs in state bodies to the editors and the staff of critical newspapers. The journalist  mentioned several newspapers including the Kakheti regional newspaper “Spektri”. Gela Mtivlishvili claimed that the journalists that worked in state bodies easily were able to get ads placed  inthe newspapers for which they continued working. This information about the newspaper caused the discontent of the editorial staff of the Spektri and they sent their response to the article. We provide it here below without any changes.

The Response of the Newspaper Spektri

On July 29 the article “How Print Media is Restricted in the Regions” by Gela Mtivlishvili was posted on www.humanrights.ge. In the beginning of the article the author writes about the Kakheti regional newspapers “Progresi”, “Spektri” and “Kakhetis Khma (the voice of Kakheti)” and notes… “after these changes the newspapers receive the large number of advertisements that is necessary for the funding of independent newspapers. For example, the newspaper ‘Spektri’has 8 pages. In the edition of July 16,  4 pages out of 8 were fully covered by the advertisements of the municipality board.”  We would like to inform that the July 16 edition of newspaper ‘Spektri’ had 12 pages with only 3 pages of ads. All ads were framed with the sign.

‘R’ which means that this is an ad. By doing this we comply with the required standard. We do not know why Mr. Gela Mtivlisvhili writes such a lie. We would like to advise him to review  his own newspaper “Imedi” where the articles and ads are not segregated. This is done to hide that  the Gurjaani district governor’s office transferred 3,287 GEL in 2008 and 965 GEL in 2009 to newspaper “Imedi”.

Newspaper “Spektri” has its own website www.kakhetiinfo.ge. We also cooperate closely with www.regions.ge. We advise all who are interested to read our newspaper and draw their conclusions only after having done this.

Editorial staff of Newspaper Skektri

We sent this letter to the author of the disputed article and asked him to comment on this. We provide his answer below.

Comment of the author:

“There are many mistakes in the response of the newspaper “Spektri”. In fact the letter was written by Maya Kalabegashvili, the press secretary of the Kakheti Regional Governor’s Office. You can tell this from the style with which the letter is written.

The newspaper “Spektri” has been published containing  8 pages for the last several months now. As for the edition of July 16, I agree that it has 12 pages but it has 4 pages of ads as mentioned in my article.

The allegation that the newspaper “Imedi” ( where I was the editor-in-chief, but which is not published any more) published ads without a special sign is not true.

The income from the ads was not calculated correctly by the Spektri editorial staff. The amount of money they mention was paid to us for the newspaper subscription. Therefore, this amount of money  can not be considered as  income from ads.”

 We can say in the name of our web site that the response of the newspaper “Spektri” deals with only technical aspects of Gela Mtivlishvili’s article. It can not change the main message of the journalist who wrote about the governmental pressure on the media.  The dispute over the number of pages is not of primary importance. The most important point is that our government (the regional government as well) is trying to put pressure on the media using the methods of intimidation of journalists and winning them over by job offers.

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