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The botched explosive demolition of the Memorial of Glory is one of the biggest stories in Georgia this year: the president has been forced to cut short an important foreign trip, a regional govenor preiviously noted for his devotion to the ruling party and its cause has been sacked and, of course, the lives of one family have been shattered by the unnecessary death of a mother and a child.

In any journalist's book this ought to be a big story and as it has been reported on across the world today it is clear that is indeed the judgement of many of the world's most important and respected news gatherers.

But in Georgia different rules apply. And rule number one is to never question the authorities explanation for any such event.

Such journalism is as cheap as it is shoddy - because it does require any serious enquiry or any attempt to actually uncover what is really going on by going one better than your rivals and breaking a story and getting a scoop.

So it has been in Kutaisi today.

Look at the clip above: you can see three microphones as local residents are interviewed about the shocking events of yesterday. But notice something else: all three microphones - for the First Channel, for Rustavi 2 and for a channel we cannot identify (Update: it is Imedi, confirming that all three national broadcasters shared a single correspondent on this story) - are being held by a single hand.

Journalism has descended into the reheating of the state's propaganda but the fiction that different news providers are out hunting for the story has to be preserved.

(The clip has no sound simply because it was easier to edit that way - the whole thing, with sound, is available via BitTorrent here)