If ever there was an obvious need for a journalism training course it was never clearer than in Georgia, where a Foundation workshop on parliamentary reporting began a day after a local television station broadcast a spoof report that Russian tanks had entered the capital Tbilisi and the president was dead. The report used real presenters, and real political and diplomatic figures, including President Obama and the U.S. and British ambassadors, putting words into their mouths. The report, which began and ended with a note that it was fiction but omitted any such indication for anyone switching on in the middle, caused panic across the country.
The story graphically underlined the need for journalistic ethics in a newly democratic country where media are owned by political parties and groups with their own agenda, and journalists are encouraged to sensationalise. All this came out during the five-day workshop in March sponsored by the Westminster Federation for Democracy, part of the Westminster Consortium for Parliament and Democracy. It was the third such workshop in a series that also took in Macedonia and Ukraine organised by the Consortium, which comprises leading experts in parliamentary practice, financial oversight and communications.
The 16 Georgian journalists were shipped out to a lakeside resort some 40 minutes from Tbilisi for a lively interchange of ideas and a series of practical writing exercises on a developing case study based on a deteriorating economy. The mainly young participants included a representative from the TV station airing the spoof report, who bravely withstood a barrage of good-humoured barbs with a smile. The incident provided a good base for an in-depth look at journalistic ethics. While some participants felt the report was the result of naivety, others noted that the pro-government station had looked at what might happen if the opposition took