How Georgian Dream Is Drying Out Independent Online Media
While independent online media outlets lost most of their funds due to current legislation, Georgia’s ruling party is said to be spending millions on favorable media organizations.
Author: Lea Eichhorn
It’s noon on a Wednesday in October when, in the middle of her interview with Civil.ge, Nino Bakradze receives a letter.
Bakradze is the editor-in-chief of iFact, an investigative media collective with years of experience uncovering corruption. It is not without irony that the letter addressed to her comes from the Georgian Anti-Corruption Bureau.
“They’re requesting information from us under these new laws,” Bakradze says as she flips through the pages. “It’s a court decision ordering us to share information about our projects, grants, and the personal data of our staff.”
The “new laws” she refers to are part of a legislative package adopted by the ruling Georgian Dream party this spring to restrict foreign funding for NGOs and media outlets. These include Georgia’s own version of the American Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and amendments to the Law on Grants. The former imposes criminal liability on those who fail to register as “foreign agents” – a stigmatizing label that in Georgia, as in many other former Soviet countries, is synonymous with “spy” – while the latter requires foreign donors to obtain government approval before disbursing local grants.
In recent months, dozens of NGOs and media organizations have been subjected to inspections under the new laws, while many others have been forced to scale back or suspend their activities to avoid punitive consequences. Georgian Dream officials have defended the measures as establishing a “minimum standard of transparency.”
Truth is rarely a business model
It has long been no secret that Georgian online media outlets rely heavily on foreign funding to sustain themselves. Most publish lists of their donors openly on their websites, and iFact is no exception. In the case of the multimedia platform Chai Khana, the list includes 22 different institutions, among them the European Union, the Government of the United Kingdom, and the Civil Society Foundation Georgia (formerly Open Society Georgia Foundation).
When the new laws came into effect, beginning with last year’s foreign agents law, the so-called “Russian Law,” Chai Khana’s director, Lika Antadze, was suddenly faced with a difficult reality. At that point, she says, Chai Khana received roughly 90% of its funding from international donors. Under the “Russian Law,” the media outlet had to either register as a “foreign agent” or cut all ties to foreign money. Antadze chose the latter: “When the law came in, we stopped the projects.”
Ninety percent of the budget is gone, yet Chai Khana has not shut down.
When it comes to money, journalism, in Georgia or anywhere else, faces one central challenge: reliable, independent information rarely turns a profit. Media outlets are therefore either publicly funded, as in the case of the Georgian Public Broadcaster (GPB), or dependent on donors and businesses. Even Georgia’s most-watched, pro-government private TV stations, such as Imedi TV and Rustavi 2, are far from financially self-sufficient. According to their 2024 financial audits, both channels accumulated debts exceeding half a billion lari. Independent watchdogs say the Imedi channel is shielded from bankruptcy by companies linked to Georgian Dream founder and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Donations, whether private or public, inevitably raise questions about their potential influence on editorial independence. “It’s a valid question,” says Antadze, but she urges a closer look at how the funding process actually works. Chai Khana never received a grant and told what to do with it, she explains, it was the other way around: “We make a proposal about what we want to do, and then you find the good fit for who wants to invest in that mission and in the vision you have.”
Antadze joined Chai Khana in 2017. In all that time, she says, they have never sent out content to a donor for approval.
Media in survival mode
In August, 22 online media outlets launched an online campaign called “The Lights Must Stay On” to raise awareness of their dire financial situation. According to Teo, a journalist and co-founder of the campaign’s organizing platform sinatle.media, most of the outlets had lost around 90% of their budgets. Yet, as became clear in interviews for this article, many of them have continued their work.
“The goal for all of us was to make it to the elections on October 4,” Teo explains. Many journalists kept working even when their outlets could no longer pay full salaries. “Journalism in Georgia has always been underpaid,” she says, “especially online journalism.” But under the current circumstances, independent reporters are more reliant than ever on financial support from their families or second jobs just to cover basic expenses. iFact’s Nino Bakradze, too, says her team has been working voluntarily since May.
One of the organizations supporting outlets such as iFact and Chai Khana is the Civil Society Foundation of Georgia (CSF). Hatia Jinjikhadze has led their media support program for 15 years. Over that time, she says, online media outlets have succeeded in establishing themselves as a relevant and influential part of Georgia’s media landscape: „They do not represent a political party, they do not represent any influential group, they represent the public, and that is why their role is important, although their impact is not as big as that of the broadcasters.“
As of August, CSF is no longer able to provide grants to media organizations. The organization was among several whose accounts were frozen by authorities as part of a “sabotage” investigation, with prosecutors accusing them of supporting violent protests by providing legal aid to those detained. CSF had also donated protective gear to journalists covering anti-government demonstrations. Jinjikhadze and the organization view the criminal charges as another means of suppressing critical voices.
A recent report by the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) indicates that the ruling party’s scrutiny of media funding primarily targets outlets critical of the government’s policies. Meanwhile, ISFED says that media organizations publicly supportive of the ruling party have received millions of GEL from party and state sources, either through direct payments or simplified procurement processes.
Online, regional outlets struggle most
While staff at critical media outlets are less optimistic about quickly finding alternative funding, they try to adapt their funding models to survive. Conditions are especially dire for smaller regional media outlets. Among them is Radio Marneuli FM, a local community radio station and online platform serving Marneuli, a municipality about 70 km south of Tbilisi, home to Georgia’s ethnically Azerbaijani and Armenian communities.
“Fifty percent of the people here are not Georgian-speaking,” Kamila Mamedova, director of Marneuli FM, tells Civil.ge. At Marneuli FM, local journalists from the ethnic communities produce daily news in three languages, reaching 40 villages on a regular basis. “We have two goals: to inform people who live in the region and speak minority languages […] and to tell the rest of Georgia about the Azerbaijani and Armenian communities without all the stereotypes.”
The team of 12 has never had substantial financial means, Mamedova says. Like many independent media outlets, the radio’s budget is composed of multiple projects, mostly funded by international donors. Because Marneuli FM also holds a broadcasting license, it is subject to another layer of restrictive legislation: April amendments to Georgia’s broadcasting laws that prohibit TV and radio channels from receiving foreign funding.
The Communications Commission (ComCom), Georgia’s state media regulator, had already issued a warning regarding a project funded by the Deutsche Welle Academy. Mamedova decided to halt the project, but is unsure how to fill the resulting budget gap. “We need to find ways of commercialising our content and work”, she says. “But we are a very specific media outlet. (…) We work for minorities, and we have our expertise, of course, about minorities.” Two of Marneuli FM’s projects are still running, but until December.
Anti-Corruption Bureau Expands Crackdown
The Anti-Corruption Bureau, a public body responsible for enforcing the new restrictive laws, has already launched inspections into at least four independent media organizations: the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, Realpolitika, Project 64, Mtisambebi, and iFact.
According to Bakradze, iFact was first contacted in September and asked to provide information about any grants they may have received since the amendment to the Law on Grants took effect. “We replied that we have not had anything like that since April, so we could not share any information with them,” she says. One month later, Bakradze received a second letter informing her of a court order at the request of the Anti-Corruption Bureau. Noncompliance could result in imprisonment. Yet Bakradze appears determined not to be intimidated: “We’ve never been scared of sharing our information, and I’m not scared right now.”
Chai Khana’s Antadze has not yet received such a letter, but she sees the risk of inspections and the burden of additional paperwork as just one piece of a larger puzzle. „It’s also the context where we operate and what’s going on on a larger scale, where we have political prisoners now, we have a media manager and a journalist in jail.“
Mzia Amaghlobeli, founder of Netgazeti and Batumelebi, two of Georgia’s major independent media outlets, is serving a two-year prison sentence after being convicted of slapping a police chief during a tense night of protests. Her trial and punishment are widely seen as a disproportionate attempt to silence and intimidate critical journalists.
Lea Eichhorn is a journalist based in Hamburg, Germany. She is currently a Marion-Dönhoff-Fellow at Civil.ge.