“The Conscience in Media award recognizes journalists who knowingly have endured great personal costs while pursuing the highest tenets of their profession,” says Sherry Beck Paprocki, president of ASJA. This selective award has been presented only twelve times since 1975.
This is no fetishistic album of cuttings of awards and prizes given to a favourite author.
This is a political response to the idiotic remarks that dominate public discourse in this country that appears to have lost the ability to think.
The American Society of Journalists and Authors knows a thing or two about journalism. They are not awarding Daphne Caruana Galizia because Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando might be annoyed. They are honouring her because she was exemplary in her pursuit of truth and quality journalism.
Now why do I keep saying this? Because it needs to be said while there are people out there who have never read anything she wrote — and couldn’t do so to save their own lives — who continue to replicate the untruth convenient to no one but Joseph Muscat and his gang (and that admittedly in a Maltese scale is a very wide circle) that Daphne Caruana Galizia was a ‘hate blogger’ who ‘asked for it’.
Being ignored or mocked or criticised does not change the truth one upholds. Nor does it reduce the will to repeat it.
So here’s to the Malta Institute of Journalists who unlike the American Society of Journalists and Authors and dozens of other professional bodies, inter-governmental agencies, universities and institutions worldwide have not found it in themselves to recognise that “Daphne Caruana Galizia represents the highest ideals of journalism: courage, sacrifice and a firm commitment to the truth.” Those are the ASJA’s words.
Biċċa blogger indeed.