TEN DAYS ago, I watched a private showing of a 40-minute documentary, titled ‘The Ambient Atmosphere’, produced by journalist and researcher Makarios Droushiotis. The strange-sounding title is a phrase that was used by President Papadopoulos last year to defend wild allegations that the US government had bribed Greek Cypriots during the period leading up to the referendum on the Annan plan. The spinning of these allegations was the subject of the documentary.
Everyone remembers this absurd story that unfolded in October last year, in which the president, the mass media and two US-based journalists played a leading role. The documentary proves that the president, the media and a group of politicians had set up an imaginary conspiracy, and used it to destroy the reputation of political opponents as well as ordinary citizens. The documentary was so compelling that three non-Cypriot journalists – two from Greece and a German – who attended the showing, all said they were shocked by what they saw. Two of them, did not bother to read the 15-minute speeches they had prepared, preferring instead to comment on what they had seen.
I have no intention of writing about the role played by the president and his political allies in this sorry affair. What annoyed me more was the dirty role played by the media and in particular the television stations. Despite having lived through the dirt campaign, watching the footage of the hysterically paranoid TV shows of those days set against footage of the real events really brought home the scale of the scam. The documentary gave a much broader view of what had happened.
US-based journalists Lambros Papantoniou and Michalis Ignatiou played the leading role in the calculated distortion of the truth and the creation of a false picture. A financial aid programme, in the administering of which the Cyprus government participated, was presented as alleged bribery aimed at “buying consciences”. Amid the prevailing hysteria, we were served as a devastating revelation what was a blatant lie – it was claimed that the spokesman of the US State Department, Richard Boucher, had admitted that the US had spent money in order to buy votes in support of the Annan plan.
The documentary, which featured the relevant excerpts of Boucher’s comments, showed clearly that the two above-mentioned journalists had engaged in a ruthless distortion of what he had said. The story they reported to the Cyprus public was pure fabrication, but it prompted a disgraceful mud-slinging campaign against the political opponents of the Papadopoulos government. The story was taken up by the Cypriot television stations which went wild for several days, presenting politicians, including members of AKEL such as Eleni Mavrou, as “paid agents of the Americans”.
This despicable story is not the only example of how journalism is practised in Cyprus. In the Republic’s 45 years of life, the media has played an instrumental part, second only to that of the politicians’, in bringing us to today’s partition. This was a spineless and servile media, which not only turned a blind eye to the criminal mistakes committed since the birth of our Republic that have led to the current situation, but worked as an accessory to those in authority, assisting them and covering up their blunders.
The most disappointing thing is that 45 years later, instead of making some progress, we have been regressing. And to be fair, the biggest share of the responsibility for this belongs to the Clerides government, which managed to hand over the critical job of forming public opinion to the most unsuitable individuals, when it granted licences for private broadcasting. That the party which committed this crime is today the biggest victim of the TV stations is probably just punishment.
