The Limits of Deliberation: TV Debate on Higher Education System Changes in Georgia

The presented article deals with the study of the deliberative quality of a television debate on the example of a public discussion held on the air of Imedi TV, a TV media affiliated with the Georgian government. The discussion concerned the fundamental changes taking place in the education system. The aim of the study is to analyze, on the one hand, the creation of the discussion agenda - setting by the participants of the debate as a genre of analytical journalism, and, on the other hand, the perception of these discursive frames by the online audience. The focus was on the methods, namely, the use of evidence and authority, that the program guests resorted to in order to gain access to the discourse.

The article is based on media monitoring and an in-depth analysis of the case of television coverage of different opinions about the changes taking place in the higher education system.

It is noteworthy that, based on monitoring, out of 127 episodes of four television analytical programs that were broadcast from the date of the presentation of the “National Concept of Higher Education” (October 16, 2025) to the start of the 2026 national exams (July 2, 2026), only 4 episodes were devoted to the ongoing changes in the education system, and public discussion between actors of different statuses with different opinions took place on television only once, in the February 14, 2026 episode of the analytical program “Open Air - Debates” of Imedi TV Company. Accordingly, the transcript of the aforementioned program was analyzed using an adapted version of the Discourse Quality Index, thematic agenda of the discussion, argumentation, and discursive legitimacy approaches. In order to identify the peculiarities of the perception of discourse frames by the addressees, a qualitative content analysis of 122 Georgian-language comments published on YouTube was conducted.

The study found that the program’s guests did not have equal access to the discourse. Accordingly, asymmetry was also evident in terms of creating the thematic agenda of the discussion. In particular, 13 out of 19 main topics were raised by the Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze. He also occupied more airtime than other guests, and it is noteworthy that 63 out of 108 coded assertions belong to him. However, as for reasoning with evidence, his discourse was less based on empirical substantiation than that of other participants in the program. Although academics and education policymakers did not gain communicative dominance because they provided less evidence, their arguments were more likely to be supported by consistent empirical data and professional knowledge.

Notably, 30.6% of the overall criticisms presented in the program were unsubstantiated, while 60.2% contained at least 1 reasoning flaw. The deliberative quality of the debate we studied was also limited by the 31 episodes that featured irony, sarcasm, and personal and/or professional discredit.

Qualitative content analysis of 122 comments from the online audience confirmed that commentators were not passive recipients of the message. The analysis revealed the repetition, reinforcement, transformation with polarized interpretations and, in some cases, replacement with specific political frameworks of discursive frames.

Thus, an in-depth analysis of one case, the February 14, 2026 episode of the Imedi TV program “Open Air – Debates”, showed that formal pluralism could not be transformed into a substantively equal deliberative discourse on television. However, it should be emphasized that the results obtained cannot be generalized, since they were revealed only in one purposefully selected episode. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the results of the study presented in the article create a fundamental basis for further large-scale research in order to determine whether the asymmetry we have identified is only a feature of this specific program or a characteristic of the Georgian polarized media system.