Why don’t we use some civic consciousness and call a spade a spade? I am talking about the May 10th press-conference organized by Georgia’s Prime Minister, the one intended to generate His Excellency’s answers to questions given by the participating political talk-show hosts of various Georgian TV stations. As simple as that!
According to the most commonly used encyclopedic definition, a press-conference is an interview given to the ladies and gentlemen of the press by a public figure, in compliance with pre-arranged appointments, in order to make an announcement or to answer the attending journalists’ questions. This is the classic format of an otherwise routine interaction between the country’s political spectrum and journalists (reporters, correspondents, broadcasters, announcers, columnists, anchors, newscasters, program-hosts and other professionals of that ilk). Technically, it all looks and sounds very plain: At a press-conference, somebody leads the show, allowing the journalists to voice their questions in turn, and the respondent seeks to satisfy the mostly well-adjusted inquisitiveness of the questioning side. To compare, a political faceoff is a direct confrontation, based on a certain important argument between two people or groups, conducive to sharp opposition, often in a televised debate. Both are universally practiced and entertained by the wider world, be they democracies or authoritarian regimes, in exactly the same way. In short, nothing new or special!
With these two definitions in mind, we can say the aforementioned meeting between the Georgian media and the current head of the country’s executive branch was not a regular press-conference, as it was initially qualified, but a pure faceoff; a real political showdown! And not the one routinely performed by leading politicians, but here run by journalists representing definite political forces in place of the real leaders of those powers.
Apropos, I am not prepared to make a judgement as to who is right and who is wrong. My story is not about ‘good-guy-bad-guy’ categories, it is only about the accuracy of a press-conference per se, one of the most significant formats of our local political procedure, the fairness of the homegrown usage of the universally adopted journalistic protocol, and the helpfulness of the suggested style of government-media interaction for Sakartvelo.
No doubt, most of our watching public was flabbergasted at the egregious breach of all those constraints, but that’s not the worst of the occurring problems. The main dilemma is whether these kinds of encounters between the government and media representatives should be perpetuated or disqualified. There was not even a vestige of European spirit and upbringing in what we were compelled to witness at that dramatic soiree of political hostility. I have spent tens of years of my grownup life in the West, and I have never seen anything like it- where a political discourse between the government and a country’s means of mass communication is always meant to find out where the truth lies, grab it if possible, and put it right to service the nation, which, speaking technically, should be achieved via questions and answers, as there is no other way to do a job of that kind. A political argument, even an utterly confrontational one, demands a relevant environment for it to take place in, and a pertinently applicable circumstance for the effort to yield a favorable outcome. Political competition and the battles thereof are a must in our sophisticated times, and we have seen many of those in the last thirty-odd years of political life in Georgia.
Head-to-head political clashes are a norm when there is a conflict out in the battlefield. Verbal skirmishes in the fight are OK, too. Even the kicking up of occasional rows in Parliament no longer comes as much of a surprise, as any dispute is bound to be ripe with anger and aggression. Political antagonism is also a regular form seen. But why such unbridled hostility, anger and physical resentment during those challenging quarrels? Why so much venom and contempt? This political style pushes the whole process off the main track, thus turning a customary press-conference into a political faceoff, which, most significantly, prevents the truth from being able to surface and work.
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
