Communicating Hydrocarbons – Fuelling Conflict or Warming Relations: Media Representations of the Natural Gas Reserves in East Mediterranean

The Mediterranean island of Cyprus, the last divided country in Europe, faced a grave risk of plunging into war in September 2011. The reason behind this danger was represented as the confrontation over the excavation of hydrocarbon reserves found in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. A significant hydrocarbon field discovery like this, where it is said that the value of the reserves is around 100 billion Euro, might be a cause for great rejoicing anywhere else in the world, but here it further escalated the Cyprus conflict. This is a comparative study, based on quantitative content analysis that focuses on the coverage of the hydrocarbons conflict in all daily Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot newspapers published in September 2011. The main goal of this thesis is to explore the extent to which peace journalism was practised, or not, by analysing the front-page stories of the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot newspapers about this conflict. This study employs critical communication research theories to critically contextualize its own findings in particular and the potential of media for practising Peace Journalism in general. Peace Journalism which become popular in the academic and professional arena during the last decade, challenges traditional journalism in several ways and offers brand new approaches for reporting local or international conflicts. A review of peace journalism research reveals that researchers have mainly focused on war reporting. In order to address this deficit in peace journalism research, this thesis focuses on a case study where there was a risk for military confrontation. The combined sample, 629 front page stories analysed for all 18 newspapers from both communities indicates a strong preference towards war journalism. The newspapers from both sides, failed to discuss peaceful solutions to the hydrocarbons conflict and they also failed to discuss negative repercussions of a possible war related to the hydrocarbons conflict. Keywords: Cyprus problem, peace journalism, war journalism, reconciliation, conflict reporting, hydrocarbons conflict, critical communication research