The politics of Anastasiades-Christodoulides ‘have sank freedom of the press’ read the banner headline on the front page of Monday’s Haravghi. Proof that the current president and his predecessor were to blame was the fact that Cyprus was 16th in the World Press Freedom Index in 2012 while in 2025 it has fallen to 77th place, behind countries such as Congo and Senegal, which are not renowned for their press freedom.

The index, published every year, is the work of the non-profit organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which was set up 40 years ago to defend and promote freedom of information. RSF has consultative status with the UN, Unicef and the Council of Europe, among others, while its World Press Freedom Index measures the state of press freedom in 180 countries. On its website, it says that it informs “about the press freedom situation throughout the world by communicating every day on abuses committed against journalists and on all forms of censorship.” Its index “measures the state of press freedom.”

There is no doubt that it performs a worthwhile role acting as a guardian of press freedom and exposing abuses by governments and businesses all over the world. Whether it is able to change anything is doubtful, even though the exposure of press freedom violations is a form of support for journalists that are targeted. Of course, what RSF seems unable to grasp is that no news medium operates in a perfect world and it might be a bit rash in giving a low ranking to a country.

Describing the situation in Cyprus as “problematic,” for example, does not reflect reality. Cyprus was given a press freedom score of 59.04 (out of 100) and it is in 77th place in the rankings, nine places below Hungary, which scored 62.82 despite the blatant way the Victor Orban’s government controls the media. There is no such control of the media by the government in Cyprus, and Haravghi, an opposition party mouthpiece, should be the first to admit it. The paper has highly critical articles about the government’s policies and the president’s decisions, on a daily basis, but it does this freely and nobody has tried to stop it.

That RSF placed Cyprus in the same category as Hungary because of “the dangerous proximity between the news media and those in power, through the opaque, unequal distribution of state advertising” is wrong. State advertising is not unequally distributed in Cyprus – not even Haravghi would make such a claim – and there is no dangerous proximity between those in power and the news media. With the exception of the public broadcaster and the state news agency, which are funded by the state, most other media – particularly the daily newspapers – are highly critical, rightly or wrongly, of the Christodoulides government.

The press freedom situation in Cyprus is not problematic, as the RSF claims, but pretty healthy. It might not be perfect, but is it perfect anywhere in the world?