In Georgia, while 2024–2026 is described as a period of significant deterioration in media rights, signs of increased state-led political influence over independent and public-interest media had become visible earlier.[1] By 2017, although Georgia’s media landscape remained pluralistic and vibrant overall, a series of significant setbacks to media independence, including consolidation among major private television stations and changes in the leadership and editorial policy of the Georgian Public Broadcaster (GPB), were signalling increasing influence over media freedom. In January 2017, following the appointment of a new GPB director, Vasil Maghlaperidze, a former employee of a television company associated with tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili,[2] several programmes critical of the government were discontinued.[3]

These developments coincided with a broader deterioration in Georgia’s democratic trajectory. In its Democracy Report 2025, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) identifies 2017 as the beginning of Georgia’s autocratisation episode, with the reversal beginning in 2018, preceding the much sharper deterioration observed in subsequent years.[4]

The process that started in 2023 accelerated these restrictive tendencies. In 2023, People's Power, formed in 2022 by MPs who had left Georgian Dream, tabled the draft Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence. The group stayed in Georgian Dream's parliamentary majority and ran on its list in the 2024 elections.[5] Although the draft was withdrawn after mass protests, a revived version passed in May 2024 with People's Power's support.[6] Its provisions applied, among others, to broadcasters, print-media owners and Georgian-language online media receiving more than 20 per cent of relevant income from a “foreign power.”

The media environment is further polarised by the presence of pro-government television broadcasters such as Imedi TV and POSTV. As reported, they have been closely linked to the ruling Georgian Dream party.[7] Media-monitoring organizations have tracked their spread of anti-Western narratives and efforts to discredit opposition actors, independent media and civil society.[8] On 24 February 2026, the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on both broadcasters under its sanctions regime against Russia for spreading deliberately misleading information about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[9] The television channels denied the accusations from the UK.[10] Georgian Dream party condemned the sanctions as an assault on media freedom and pledged to support the broadcasters in the public eye.