Maestro TV Slams MP for ‘Insult’

Tbilisi-based small television station, Maestro TV, said on February 10, that remarks voiced by senior lawmaker from the ruling party, Givi Targamadze, about the TV’s political reality show were “insulting” and deemed them as “a pressure and a threat.”

Speaking in the public TV’s program, Political Week, on February 8 MP Givi Targamadze, the chairman of parliamentary committee for defense and security, lashed out at that Maestro TV’s show “Cell Number 5.”

“The maximum what these people managed to come up with in the 21st century – when Georgia at last got rid of many of the Soviet clichés – is that several drug addicts are now preaching the society from ‘cell’ how to request Russians to invade us softly… They are competing with each other in rudeness, in cowardice – competing which of them is more afraid of Russia and as they are discussing it they have already reached the point where they are so deep inside Russians that only their lags are now seen on the TV cameras,” MP Givi Targamadze said. He also added that it was his personal opinion, which he had the right to voice, like those people involved in the Maestro TV’s show.

“Cell No. 5” – named in an obvious reference to Mikheil Saakashvili’s and the ruling party’s number on ballot papers in the recent elections – was launched in January and dubbed as “protest TV.” Giorgi Gachechiladze, with nickname Ucnobi (Unknown), who is a brother of former opposition presidential candidate, Levan Gachechiladze, put himself in self-imposed ‘imprisonment’ in an improvised cell packed with cameras and vowed to stay there unless President Saakashvili resigns. He invites guests in his ‘cell’ discussing in a casual manner ongoing developments, mainly political ones. His guests often include opposition politicians and also actors, singers, journalists. Among his recent guests were Georgia’s former ambassador to Russia, Erosi Kitsmarishvili; Public Defender, Sozar Subari; theater director Robert Sturua. The show goes live all night and segments of edited version are aired during a day.

Mamuka Glonti, owner of the TV station, said on February 10, that the senior MP’s “attack” on the television amounted “to pressure” and “insult” of the station, but also of the invited guests. “Targamadze should now either apologies or arrest us for being, as he said, Russia’s agents,” Glonti said.

In his televised question and answer session with the public on January 23, President Saakashvili mentioned the Maestro TV’s show as one of the examples that there was freedom of speech and media in Georgia.

“When they say on TV that we have not freedom of speech – and they say it while speaking live for 3 hours – it is ridiculous. I am a devoted viewer of one of the programs, an entertaining program from the ‘prison cell’ – by the way, it is a very comfortable prison cell, but we have even better ones in the Rustavi or Gldani prisons,” Saakashvili said jokingly.

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