The Undemocratic Role of Turkish Cypriot Radio News in the Cyprus Conflict

Abstract

Drawing on newsroom studies and a Critical Discourse Analysis of news broadcasts this paper looks at the way Turkish Cypriot radio news in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is guilty of hampering democratic processes, particularly as regards the resolution of the conflict with the Republic of Cyprus.  On the one hand stations appear to support currently popular pro-solution politics but a closer look at the language used shows that each uses lexical and grammatical choices to also communicate threat and suspicion, in each case slightly differently to support their own associated ideologies and interests, which are consistently anti-solution.  For all intents and purposes these are news organisations only in terms of the ‘news semiotic’.  Employees called journalists work with news agency feeds, write, produce, edit and air news stories for newscasts daily like news in other European states, but what they are in fact doing is reflecting the interests of elites associated with each station, working to the detriment of democratic popular notions of unity throughout Cyprus.