The reports in the international media are starting to irk the prime minister’s office.
Keith Schembri’s assistant, MP Alex Muscat, writing today in The Malta Independent, branded international press reports “biased” and “distorted”.
Because of course it is reasonable to expect that when a journalist is incinerated in a bomb, the press take a “balanced” approach and look into why she deserved it in the first place.
Alex Muscat measures the world press as he measures the Maltese press, as fitting in either one of two categories. It is either fawning media owned and controlled by the Labour Party (that’s the good guys) and everybody else (that’s the bad guys who are Nationalists).
The Guardian, Rai, Sueddeutsche Zeiting, Liberation, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Panorama, l’Espresso, El Pais, La Repubblica, The Economist and many, many, many others came here and made an assessment of the situation. What they saw was a government that opened up the country and gave a free hand to organised crime. And then they saw the inevitable happen. The one who broke the omertà that protects organised crime, ended up dead.
Which bit were they missing? The spin Labour has been putting on this. That she “could be proliferating gossip and fake news. Her political bias conditioned most of her work. There’s no doubt about it, you either loved her or loathed her.” I’m quoting directly the words of the Deputy Chief of Staff of Malta’s prime minister. This is official policy. This is the official discourse of the government of Malta. ‘Her skirt was too short’.
As if any of this has any relevance to her death. As if a personality profile of the victim is relevant in investigating a crime, rather than actually assessing the personality profile of her likely assassins.
The international press get their instructions from no one. In that they recognise Daphne Caruana Galizia as one of their own.