Many people talk about freedom and independence of the media, its trustworthyness is also frequently discussed. IPM conducted a nationwide study, using face to face interviewing method to understand what people really think. The survey captured 1200 respondents.

 

chart 1. Importance of Media Independence	According to survey results 64% of population considers that the importance of media independence is extremely high,   31% thinks that it is somewhat important, in overall it can be seen, that for the vast majority of the respondents independence of the media is important. Only 2% of the surveyed respondents do not consider this issue as important.
chart 2. Trust towards media	The survey showed that only 15% of the surveyed respondents completely trust Georgian media. (see chart 2). It should be outlined that major part of the respondents (72%) have some kind of mistrust towards media. About 8% express complete mistrust towards Georgian media.

The respondents were also asked if they consider media in Georgia to be free, the index was derived based on the respondents’ answers, which defines people’s disposition towards the discussed issue, the meaning of index is from 0-to 100.

 

Maxmal meaning of the index (Index = 100) corresponds to completely free media environment, while its minimal meaning (Index = 0) means that media in Georgia is absolutely influenced and completely controlled by external powers. The meaning of index, based on survey results equals to 59, which is higher than average, although cannot be stated as very high.

 

chart 3. Level of media freedom assessment trend

It is interesting to observe, how media freedom index changed over years. To form the trend, the results of the similar surveys conducted by IPM in previous years were used. Observing the dynamic of index variation (chart  3) it can be seen that the index of 2016 has considerably decreased, compared with  previous year (from 72 to 59) and the lowest indicator for the past 4 years was reached- 59. It should also be noted, that in the period of Georgian Dream governance  (2012 – 2016) average meaning of index equaled to 64, while in the period of National Movement Governance (2008 – 2012)  the index equaled - 54. Maximal index indicator (72) was observed in 2015.

As a conclusion, it can be said, that based on the Georgian population opinion, the media environment is not fully free from influence. As a result, it can be assumed that media sources do not have complete trust of the population, although almost every respondent mentioned that the independence of media is a must and this issue is important.