news – Nicholas Karides

Row over Reporters without Borders Index exposes journalism’s real quandary

It is rather curious, bordering on the suspicious, when a news organisation comes out to defend the state of media freedom in the country in which it is published. Not that media freedom in any said country might not be first class – one could for example be working in Norway – but primarily because journalists have a tendency to complain however good the conditions.

So, it didn’t seem quite right when earlier this month the Cyprus Mail in an editorial under the headline “Press freedom alive and well in Cyprus, despite what report says” rebuffed the findings of Reporters Without Frontiers (RSF) which found that the country had dropped 12 places to 77^th in the World Press Freedom Index¹.

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The Mail went further to criticize another newspaper, the former communist party’s mouthpiece Haravghi for blaming (unsurprisingly for Haravghi) the last two right-wing governments for the slide. The Mail objected asserting that the situation in Cyprus “is not problematic, as the RSF claims, but pretty healthy. It might not be perfect, but is it perfect anywhere in the world?”

An uncharacteristically soft but, more seriously, a potentially dangerous approach. It reflects the maddening Cypriot practice of settling for cozy mediocrity (at best) always quick to dismiss the findings of expert bodies. A persistent reliance on the illusion that things are not that bad which prevents the country from becoming better.

But the Mail’s approach is dangerous for another reason. It is just not true. The situation in Cyprus is problematic.

While rankings, and our fixation with them are distracting and RSF’s work is not scientifically foolproof, it remains a valuable tool and indicator. More so as its overall assessment is corroborated by the more scrupulous monitoring from the EUI’s Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom². Both organisations monitor variables that are crucial for the proper functioning of media and democracy encouraging vigilance by watchdogs while putting pressure on stakeholders and practitioners.

In Cyprus’ case the RSF report described the influence of the government, the Church and business interests over the media as significant elements that “undermine media pluralism and push journalists towards self-censorship”. It raised concerns about “direct interference in editorial decisions through informal relationships between politicians and media owners, the growing media concentration and the lack of transparency in media ownership.”

This is in fact the type of criticism that the Mail’s own flagship Coffeeshop column had frequently identified. And it is the reason why the Mail – at least until some years ago before it was purchased by a local legal firm – was considered the island’s only independent newspaper. Established in 1945 and ran by generations of newspapermen it was healthily detached from the establishment (and very often ignored by it) allowing its reporting to be bold and free of local bias and hyperbole. Governments of the day underestimated its significance but the paper was read by the diplomatic community, the Cypriot intelligentsia, the substantial non-Greek-speaking population and the diaspora.

Today, while it might be true that the Mail remains free of the influence of the government and the Church, one may question whether it is free of the influence of business interests, especially those of its new owners³ and possibly their clients.

More recently the paper introduced a new slogan: “News that Matters” begging the question: To whom? And to what end? The answer lies in the new suffocating culture of business worshiping that has embraced the country’s media over the last decade which has blown the vital door between their editorial and commercial departments wide open. In the age of fewer journalistic staff, more sponsored content and press releases posing as reporting, the barrier between editorial positions and commercial interests has been obliterated – against the public interest.

In a democracy, we the citizens offer and defend the media’s right to be free of state control but also of private control. And while we defend their right to be free, we do not offer them the right to be free from being accountable to us. Running a newsroom is a profound public duty and involves a covenant of trust. Those to whom we offer the freedom and privilege to exercise that duty are expected to be guardians of that trust – not promoters of the interests of their owners or funders.

The situation in Cyprus is made worse by the fact – shameful for the Cypriot state – that there is no functioning legal framework regulating the media landscape. This has bred chaos online and allowed ill-equipped or malicious media owners and operators to push their political or economic agenda onto an unsuspecting public without the burden of accountability, including to the Cyprus Media Ethics Committee.

Independent journalism needs independent financing. And while there is truth in the notion that no one can be absolutely objective, news organisations, serious ones at least, can put in place objective editorial processes to eliminate bias from their decision-making.

More and more media outlets are discovering that to have credibility they have to be transparent – about their ownership and their editorial processes. It is important for the public to know who the media are and where their news selections and views are coming from to decide whether they can be taken seriously or not. At a time when media globally are struggling financially and corporate investors are rushing to ‘save’ them, big money is devouring their soul and eroding the public’s trust and respect for them.

Bucking the trend is the world-wide growth of non-profit collaborative journalism (even here; the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network is an example). It’s a new journalism that relies on donors, crowd funding and memberships rather than corporate investment and advertising. The situation is not hopeless. A growing movement of citizens is demanding more. If media want their trust and respect, they need to become trustworthy and respectful. Profit won’t come quickly but journalism was never meant to be about that.

1. RSF – https://rsf.org/en/index

2. CMPF – https://cmpf.eui.eu/media-pluralism-monitor-2024/

3. CIREN – https://ciren.cy/who-owns-the-media-in-cyprus/

Note: The author is the director of the Institute for Mass Media; a member of the Board of Advisors of the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network and a member of the Cyprus team for the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom.

Christopher Hitchens, the British born American journalist and writer, died exactly 12 years ago today, on 15 December 2011, aged 62. In recent days, following the death of Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, at the age of 100, Hitchens resurfaced in the news.

Hitch, as he was known to his friends, had spent years deploying his relentless journalistic intelligence to push for Kissinger to face justice for crimes against humanity committed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Chile. In 2001 he had dedicated his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger¹ [the original rejected title was Henry Kissinger: Portrait of a Serial Killer] to “the brave victims of Henry Kissinger, whose example will easily outlive him and his ‘reputation’.”

And reputation – legacy – is what it’s all about. In the last weeks some writers could not resist pointing to the ‘injustice’ that Kissinger’s lifespan had out-passed the smoke-filled alcohol-rich life of his critic. Less flippantly, whether a form of justice was in fact served, given that twelve years after his death, Hitchens managed to infiltrate almost every Kissinger obituary hacking the whitewashing that the former Secretary of State had diligently orchestrated since he left office in 1976.

The notion that longevity is somehow a divine reward for a worthwhile life would have made the atheist Hitchens laugh. As would the self-deceiving Christian Orthodox comfort-talk, murmured at the funerals of those who have died young, that God tends to recall early those he/she loves the most.

Now that they are both dead it could be argued – and here one has to be respectful of Hitchens’ atheism – that a more ‘divine’ justice has been served by the fact that while Kissinger overstayed, it is the early-departed Hitchens who is forever missed. For his wit, his breath of knowledge, and his capacity to connect the shallow immediacy of politics to the heavy weight of history.

He is especially missed by those who lament the absurd state of global politics and the shameful level of our public discourse. A state of affairs that is nothing less than Kissingerian; a reflection of the dominance of Kissinger’s amoral school of political thought where expediency rules and where autocratic populist leaders’ rise to power is backed despite their record of suppressing free thinking and reasoned dialogue.

Both men played a role in how I personally see the world, the political world at least. Kissinger as the bogeyman who haunted the fate of Cyprus in the mid Seventies through his duplicitous disregard for international law and his unsentimental view of human suffering. Hitchens, partly for writing the first definitive book on Cyprus² that exposed Kissinger’s machinations at a time when Nixon’s Watergate paranoia had rendered the Secretary of State the de-facto Commander-in-Chief.

But, more importantly, because Hitchens exposed – with equally Kissingerian unsentimentality – wrongdoings and misrepresentations and fought for the freedom of ideas and seemingly forgotten political causes. And because, with his own brand of uncompromising journalism, he exposed the hypocrisy of institutions and political leaders. He deconstructed organized religion and identified the illiberal trajectory of our disorganized democracies and shot down bullies and bigots pursuing the truth without regard to personal consequence.

Both men were mesmerizing conversationalists who hovered behind-the-scenes in Washington and paraded in front of the global media glare. But behind that glare Kissinger inhabited the darkness where corporate greed mingles with political power while Hitchens lived in the trenches and on the page where facts battled myths.

As a politician of intrigue and deception Kissinger used words to hide what he was thinking and wrote to boost his ego and obfuscate what he had once done. As a political writer Hitchens used words not just to deliver with exactitude what he was thinking, but to expose with scathing sharpness what Kissinger-types were hiding.

The greatest pity perhaps is that in the twelve years since Hitchens’ death, the world has been deprived of a fierce and illuminating critique of so many other contemptible political figures who rose to power on the back of Kissinger’s rotten ethics.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Verso, 2001
Cyprus, Quartet Books, 1984; Later published in paperback as Cyprus: Hostage to History, Verso, 1997.

Photo: Corbis via Getty Images