Peace Journalism in North Cyprus

Abstract

Conflicts are alive everywhere in the world and journalists report them. The situation in Cyprus is similar. We present the results of an investigation on how the media reconcile the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities and how the media contribute to the peace process in Cyprus. The author believe that the journalists in both communities can play important roles in bringing a peaceful solution to the island’s long standing and what seems to the outside to be an unsolvable problem. The basic aims of this paper are to look at the news selection process of the North Cyprus news media as well as looking into how news-writing journalists report the conflict news and how fateful they keep to the peace journalism approach. A questionnaire and in-depth interviews were applied in this study. In the questionnaire, there are 37 statements, 30 of them were test statements about peace journalism, and 7 were demographic statements that were: age, gender, organization, duty, experience, salary and education. Questionnaire results have shown that; • News-writing journalists try and display the unseen effects of conflict on the society. • News-writing journalists in North Cyprus accept the statements: “A journalist should take on an active role in trying to bring the people within conflict areas together and maintaining peace” and “Do not to transmit only the peace messages of the elite group.” • North Cyprus journalists strive to find out who had metaphorically thrown the first stone. • 76.6 percent of the participating journalists agree with the peace journalism oriented statements. • Female journalists, older journalists, experienced journalists, and highly-educated journalists are more peace journalism oriented than male, younger, inexperienced, and unqualified (apprentice) educated journalists. In the in-depth interviews the author attended to understand how North Cyprus news editors select the news items to be published. The advantage of the in-depth interviews was to allow respondents to take the discussion wherever they wished. The author met 8 news editors which is ninety percent of the North Cyprus news media. The results of in-depth interviews show that:Most of the editor’s news criteria are the same. Generally, the Cyprus problem oriented stories, accident, robbery and crime stories are the most popular for the North Cyprus print media editor’s. • Almost all of them use the Turkish News Agency news bulletin as one of their main news source. • The final decision of the news selection for publication rests with the editors in consultation with the owners of the newspapers. • What matters to the North Cyprus news media is not the source or the person/organizations providing/making the news but most importantly what matters is the content and the subjects of the news matter. North Cyprus print media news selection is “subjective”. Editors in the North Cyprus print media select the news to be published according to their newspaper news publishing policy. Furthermore, the editors make heavy use of the Turkish News Agency – as well as the Cyprus news bulletin in their publication decision making process. In summary, this paper will expose the reader to the news publishing practices and principles of the thus far unknown North Cyprus news media and its contribution positive/negative to the ongoing peace process in the Cyprus problem.