AKEL on the Auditor General’s report on the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (RIK)

Statements by AKEL MP Christos Christofides after the session of the Parliamentary Control Committee

24 February 2022

We outlined our views as a Party today, as we did during the last session of the Parliamentary Finance Committee, that the most serious problem RIK faces today is the distorted perception that what the government says is important, while what the opposition says is not. The result of this mindset, which has been imposed on RIK in recent years, is that the views of the government and ruling DISY party are transmitted for the longest possible media time, especially in the news bulletins, while the time allocated to the opposition’s views is just a few seconds with a statement that may or may not need an effort to be understood.

There has been an effort over the last few years to appoint DISY leading officials or DISY trusted people in all the key positions of RIK. Today too, we heard of the case of a journalist who applied for a support staff position and ended up presenting an important program. We have heard of a case of a man who was sent on secondment to the Cyprus News Agency and did not show up at the new workplace, who faced numerous disciplinary offences and was eventually rewarded with an appointment to the position of deputy supervisor, as recorded in the Auditor-General’s report. Such cases demonstrate the attempt to put public broadcasting under complete party control.

We would like to express our strong dissatisfaction with this development and underline that public service broadcasting has a very important role to play. We would like to express our appreciation for the overwhelming majority of RIK employees who are doing their utmost to serve the purpose of public broadcasting. However, we will criticise the democratic deficiencies of RIK, which in our view reflect the democratic deficiencies of society itself. We hope, belatedly, that there will be a different approach on the part of the leadership of RIK so that it can fulfill its role correctly.