L’Espresso: Matthew Caruana Galizia on his mother and her work (English original)

Here’s the original English text by Matthew Caruana Galizia translated and published today by L’Espresso.

The morning after we buried my mother, when it was still dark, I went to the site of the explosion. A foreign journalist who came to the scene had left a Sakharov Prize notebook hanging from a burned shrub on the spot where the main blast went off. Its pages were all wet and crinkled with the morning dew. Across the front, in large print, it says “EVERYBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.”

Whoever left it there knows what journalism is about. Ultimately you’re in this job because you’re earnest and righteous and because hypocrisy, crime, cynicism, injustice, moral compromise and corruption anger you so much that you can’t help but express yourself about it. Any journalist whose first thoughts are about money or upsetting corrupt forces ,is in the wrong job.

Yes, it’s a hard investigation – the kind that gets you blown up while running errands. My mother operated with zero outside resources. All of her funding came from publishing a monthly food and design magazine which she herself edited.

If other reporters can’t do the same with all the resources currently at their disposal, then what on earth are they doing?