As a student living in the UK, I solely rely on the online Cypriot media to be kept up-to-date with life in my beloved island. Thanks to the efforts of my friends at WabbieWorks, I have a great website that aggregates all the Cypriot media in one place: Protoselido. It is to my great sadness, however, that the quality of the news published by the Cypriot media is declining, not only insulting the reader’s intelligence, but also sometimes altering the facts and shadowing the truth.
Before I start complaining, I should note that this post does not wish to defame the work done by all journalists in Cyprus — there are some who believe in what they are doing and the quality of their work is superb. This post is only meant to criticise the black sheep in that community, that expose the ugly side of Cypriot media. In the first revision of the post I also included links to various newspapers demonstrating the behaviour I will talk about, however, since my goal is not to accuse but to stimulate your thoughts I decided to leave them out.
First, there are noumerous examples of news articles that instead of exposing the facts, and just the facts, authors include their own personal opinion in them. Of course, everyone is entitled to his opinion, but when it comes to reporting facts and news your opinion, dear journalist, is irrelevant. Facts are facts, your opinion is your opinion, please don’t mess it up! If you want to express your opinion, please do so in a different article, marking it: MY OPINION. Some of us care to read just facts, I don’t need your commenting on them, I can figure out whats going on by myself. Additionally, mocking people and criticising their job, when you’re just in front of a computer typing an article doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a jerk. In foreign press, when you want to criticise someone else, you first must be ready to face the consequences and any further judgement upon your work and second you must know what you are talking about. If you are no expert, please shut up, and stop talking. If you want to report just the news, go ahead, thats fine, but KEEP YOUR OPINION TO YOURSELF.
Then I move on to statistics. There are plenty of articles out there that cite “scientific research” and “trusted sources”. There are articles warning us of “health risks”, “human behaviour” and so on. But they almost never cite their sources, or they never give clear statistics figures. Sometimes their statistics numbers don’t add up, where is the missing percentage dear journalist? Your dog ate it? They also never tell us how many people were chosen to participate, how many finished the survey and why the rest of them did not participate or never completed the survey. Not reporting part of their project is concealing the truth, and a concealed truth is not a “partial truth”, there is no such thing, its a LIE. Of course, the real issue is that the majority of your readers can’t read through the numbers, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but then again does this gives you the right to mess up with the numbers?
Continuing with the citation problem. You can’t tell us that “an american research said X”, you must tell us exactly WHICH american research. Was that research peer-reviewed via a journal or a publication, or you, my dear expert journalist, thought it was legit and it made its way into the news? This is how misleading facts are spread around via “legitimate” channels. The media must expose their source of information when it comes to scientific studies and warnings in order to stop spreading inaccuracies and avoid starting a general panic over illegitimate data.
Journalists and media ghouls must be really conscious on the amount of exposure a subject takes. We’ve all seen how manipulative the media can be, they can take a small incident and transform it into the issue of the century with overexposure, publishing the same thing over and over again in order to cause a general panic or expose someone they do not really like. Unfortunately Cyprus is small, and everyone is influenced by the political parties. For me, it is a blasphemy for a media house to be owned by a political party. It is outrageous when owners of media houses to say publicly that they elected a specific president because they exposed the “right news“. What are the right news, and who are you to judge that?
I sincerely hope that now that Cyprus is walking out of the shadows of the past, now that over 60% of our youth goes to Universities that this situation is going to improve. I hope that now that people are educated will start complaining more about the declining quality of the media in Cyprus and start demanding quality press, like the rest of our Europe neighbours have.
