“Free the regime’s prisoners!” has been waved on posters and shouted through megaphones in Tbilisi for more than a year.
Now, some of them are actually being released.
Seven people detained after the October 4, 2025 protest outside the presidential residence on Atoneli Street are expected to walk free after signing plea agreements, Interpressnews reported yesterday. Several more are reportedly seeking similar deals.
That is newsworthy. Freeing the detainees has been the opposition’s key demand since the protest movement began after the contested 2024 parliamentary election. Those in detention for the post-election protest are a key obstacle to bringing Georgia’s political enemies closer toward dialogue. An incredibly important development.
DFWatch reported the development. So did Georgia Today, one of the few English-language outlets in Tbilisi that behaves like a regular newspaper. When something happens, they report it. That should not be unusual, but in today’s Tbilisi media landscape, it is. Many seem to tick numerous boxes on our list of tell-tale signs of a spin outlet.
There used to be a saying in the news business: “I don’t care what the facts are, I just care what the facts are.” It’s a simple rule. You report the news regardless of which political side benefits from it.
But where are the spin outlets on this story? At the time of writing, we could not find the plea-deal story on Civil.ge, JAMnews or OC Media. Perhaps it will appear later. Perhaps we missed it. But the absence is striking, given how much attention these outlets have given to the protest movement, the detainees and the slogan demanding their release.
If arrests are news, releases are news too. This is the problem with spin reporting. It does not necessarily invent facts, but instead selects which facts matter and omits context. A fact that supports the message of the preferred ‘side’ is amplified. If a fact undermines that message, it is delayed, or ignored.
We saw this also when judges ruled in favor of opposition activists, and when a European ambassador got in hot waters over too close ties to an opposition party.
This doesn’t mean to relax our critical reporting on democratic rights. These plea deals involve accepting guilt. They are not acquittals. Defendants may accept them because they want to get out of prison. On the October 4 story, as other stories, DFWatch will continue to critically report the facts, whichever ‘side’ appears to benefit from each story.
