International Press Institute issues media freedom alert on Cyprus
May 2, 2025Israel kills Al Jazeera journalists in targeted Gaza City airstrike
August 11, 2025It 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 77th 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