Sounding the CIReN

Nicholas Karides*

The sound of a siren is meant to be annoying. You tolerate it because you acknowledge that it is intended as a warning of impending danger. The newly launched Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network CIReN - the pun too convenient to ignore - aims to explore and expose the social, financial, environmental, political and institutional wrongdoings in Cyprus. It aims to investigate and inform. In the process it could end up being annoying.

As an independent, non profit, investigative platform with a commitment to high ethical standards of quality journalism in the public interest, it has an obligation to annoy, given the barren media landscape in the country.

Cypriots usually find out about serious cases of wrongdoing happening in their own back yard only when international investigative news outlets expose them. Pockets of good journalism do exist - as do many good journalists - and ‘scandals’ are frequently exposed. But they are rarely pursued in the public interest. They are mostly played out as part of a partisan tit-for-tat between the political or corporate players who exploit the declining and often trapped media as part of their game. 

Their malfunctioning business model, loss of revenue, the cozying up to the political elite have left little room for progress let alone any overhaul. There has been little desire for uncompromising journalism and a near total absence of thorough investigative journalism.

Newsrooms continue to shrink as do the salaries of journalists while staff tasked to create sponsored content and organize corporate events paradoxically continue to grow. The line separating their commercial and editorial departments has thinned as fast as transparency of media ownership has grown densely dark. This has inevitably led to a culture of self-censorship which has meant that the public has been denied its right to useful and solid information.

As if their own existential problems were not enough, media in Cyprus, not unlike media elsewhere, have been sucked into the jaws of the social media disorder. A digital dystopia that has hypnotized the global public through a cacophonous, incessant noise of vacuous, distracting and mostly reckless reporting and disinformation. It is the culture of copy-paste, the tendency to break usually unverified news (in fact, mostly non-news) as fast as possible with the aim of generating clicks; not to properly informing citizens or promoting a more rational public discourse.

In 2023 investigative journalism workshops were held in Cyprus as part of a project supported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Network and the Institute for Mass Media. They included Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot journalists and researchers who made it depressingly clear that the majority of the media were not only not investigating the stories that were worthwhile but when worthwhile stories were covered by international media, Cypriot media were not adequately reporting on them.

Far more depressing was to face journalism students fully aware of the poor state of affairs in the sector they were so keen to join, angry at how things were allowed to deteriorate and completely dismayed by the pessimism of their professors.

But recently something began to shift in the Cypriot information ecosystem. Like the students, the public at large is demanding more from its media and, significantly, it is becoming impossible for journalists to ignore this changing sentiment. Also, rather encouragingly, opinion polls by the Cyprus Union of Journalists showed that the public continued to trust journalists as a collective far more than it trusted the media that employed them.

CIReN has been set up by journalists and will be managed exclusively by journalists. The type who are determined to produce accurate and evidence-based journalism through editorial processes rooted in rigorous research, fact-checking and transparency.

A proper democracy needs properly functioning media. And it needs them to be annoying even at the best of times. A democracy in which the majority of the media are themselves malfunctioning requires of the few media that are not, to be doubly annoying.

*  Nicholas Karides is the Director of IMME
   and a member of CIReN’s Advisory Board.