MEDIA POLARIZATION AND POLITICAL FRAMING IN GEORGIA

The 2024 Parliamentary Election and the Subsequent Political Crisis

Abstract

This paper examines how major Georgian media outlets framed key events surrounding the 26 October 2024 parliamentary election and the political crisis that followed. Using an event-based comparative approach, it considers secondary media-monitoring evidence and selected reporting by television, radio and online outlets. Four frames guide the analysis: institutional legitimacy, electoral legitimacy, conflict, and European integration/sovereignty. The findings suggest that media polarization was not static: the central object of political contestation shifted from electoral competition to the legitimacy of election results and parliament, and then to the country’s European trajectory. Differences between outlets appeared not only in the events they selected, but also in terminology, source attribution, the assignment of responsibility and the prominence given to particular actors. The paper argues that event-based framing helps explain how a shared political event can acquire competing meanings in a polarized media environment.