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Despite President Saakashvili's record of reforms, Georgia consistently ranks low on press freedom indices. Similar news reports on the country's three main TV stations are the latest hint of a tightly controlled media.

Earlier this month, newscasters on Georgia's three main TV channels, Rustavi 2, Imedi TV and the public broadcaster Channel 1, read out very similar reports on a controversial death in police custody. The incident has renewed suspicion that the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili maintains firm control of its media, despite its publicly declared commitments to democratic reform.

The news story was about how opposition politicians, linked to Saakashvili's main political rival, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, had supposedly politicized the death of 46 year-old Solomon Kimeridze. Authorities maintain Kimeridze, a burglary suspect, tripped and fell three floors to his death while in police custody. The story focused on the opposition politicians' reactions, which journalists portrayed as inappropriate, and only briefly mentioned the fact that the politicians were questioning the suspicious circumstances of a man's death in police custody.

Each of the three TV stations used nearly identical video footage and news scripts.

Journalist Nino Zuriashvili wasn't surprised by the similar broadcasts

According to the watchdog group Transparency International, such "coordinated news coverage is a strong indication for a lack of editorial independence of the country's major broadcasters." For independent journalists and ordinary citizens in Georgia, that's not surprising.

"This is not the first time. It happens a lot that the sequence of news stories and the topics of these stories are the same on different channels," said Nino Zuriashvili, an investigative journalist who worked for Rustavi 2 until it dropped its popular investigative program when Saakashvili was elected president in 2004.

Little trust in information

The private owners of Rustavi 2 and Imedi TV have close ties to the Saakashvili administration, while Channel 1 is state-owned. These three are the only nation-wide channels that provide news programs. They never broadcast news negative to the government. Instead the president's ribbon-cutting ceremonies and speeches are covered extensively.

There have been protests calling for more balanced coverage by Georgia media

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Little media freedom in Saakashvili's Georgia