Azerbaijani Television: From Shows to Intellectual Debate

Under the bright July sun and against the backdrop of the newly rebuilt hilltop town of Shusha, the government of Azerbaijan opened the third Global Media Forum on Saturday. The event gathered journalists, agency executives, and digital media experts from 52 countries. But the three-day gathering, officially titled “Digital Pathways: Strengthening Information Resilience and Media in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” quickly evolved into a stage where President Ilham Aliyev articulated a sweeping doctrine: national sovereignty, postwar stability, and Azerbaijan’s growing role as a regional power.

In recent days, independent journalists in Azerbaijan have been receiving "job offers" from foreign media through various networks.

In a five-minute video uploaded to his Instagram account this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a radical shift in the company’s content moderation policies, signaling the end of its fact-checking program in the United States.

On December 23, at the Baku Court for Grave Crimes, the prosecutor requested a nine-year prison sentence for detained journalist Teymur Karimov. The prosecutor also proposed that he be found guilty under Article 182 (extortion by threat) and, as an additional punishment, be banned from engaging in journalistic activities for 2 years and 6 months.