In 2017, Maltese journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in a horrific car bomb explosion a few metres away from her home. It is still not known who has done it, or who has commissioned it, but the entire nation knows why.
Joseph Muscat is a known contributor to fake news for the sake of political publicity mainly committing to promises which turn out to be untrue. In 2016, he said how Malta’s south would witness hundreds if not thousands of students attending the new American University of Malta. With a rough number of 3,000 students supposedly enrolled at the university, these students have never been seen but our government swears they’re there.
Daphne Caruana Galizia ran a blog called the Running Commentary in which she posted a number of stories exposing the government, Prime Minister, Opposition and other popular figures in Malta. Politicians seemed to be the main target in her line of fire, with many of them claiming that everything she posted was fake news.
Fake news is described as the deliberate spread of hoaxes and misinformation via traditional media and social media. So, if everything she wrote was a lie, how did her blog regularly attract 400,000 views? How did it become one of Malta’s most visited websites? Why did politicians — scratch that- why do politicians care so much about what she wrote?
It may be understandable why a politician would hate on a journalist like Caruana Galizia, it wasn’t just because her stories were a source of ‘malafama’ (maltese term for slander) but on majority of occasions she had the evidence to back it up, she seemed to have eyes not just everywhere on the island but also overseas. Economy Minister Chris Cardona, was caught visiting a brothel in Germany during an official government visit back in January 2017. He obviously denied the allegations saying that they were “a prime example of fake news.”
To no one’s, yet somehow everyone’s surprise, photos emerged of the Economy Minister inside the FKK Acapulco club (advertised as a sauna club), sitting with an unknown bald man. The allegations were retracted a few months later.
The Panama Papers Scandal? That was all Daphne. She knew who held accounts and where and probably how much. While Muscat said that “it is impossible to hide a million dollars” members of his cabinets as well as his wife were uncovered to have held offshore accounts. He claimed, it was all just slander against his wife and put a strain on their family.
Why did Joseph Muscat want to bring her down?
His actions are quite flip-floppy when it comes to the matter. On the 17th of October, 2017, news broke that he contacted the Scotland Yard and the FBI to help with her murder investigations. A few days later, he was telling her three sons in court that their mother was not to be excused for what she wrote in her blog because she had hurt a lot of people, including his own family. A couple of days ago, he announced that “[He] wants all facts to emerge in [her] murder.”
A little over two months after her murder, John Sweeney dubbed the Prime Miniser the “artful dodger of Europe” during an interview with him.
“There isn’t a shred of truth on what she said on all this.” — Joseph Muscat
While Muscat does admit that she wrote “facts” and “cutting-edge stories” he mentions how she published equally as much lies and false stories which he says, he doesn’t know whether she knew if they were real or not. After Sweeney calls him out during the interview you can witness the moment Muscat loses his sales-marketer smile and goes on to say that Caruana Galizia herself was either part of the invention of such lies in relation to the Panama Papers or was fed the lies.
“…I hope we are not in a situation where in any democracy, erm, situations are such where if someone writes something on social media it’s taken as a fact” — Muscat
“But you’re doing exactly that aren’t you? She was killed brutally and you’re saying some of the time she was running gossip” — Sweeney
Her murder did not just shake the maltese public but made waves all around Europe. If it was all fake news, why would she still be receiving awards for her writing and exposè’s? She may have made many enemies through her writing but she investigated and exposed corruption because she couldn’t bear to see people like that rewarded; and so she made it her mission to see that they weren’t.
As her niece once said during a journalism lecture at the University of Malta on the anniversary of her death last year, no one is killed the way Daphne was killed over fake news. The woman was blown to pieces at her sons feet, metres away from their family home. Over the years since she started her investigative journalism through her blog, there had been several attempts to break into her home as well as to murder her. That is not the result of fake news. When your own Prime Minister is willing to cover for his own cabinet instead of ask for justice, you know that there must be an element of truth to her writing.
Finally, the courts new inquiry into her murder will go into whether the State caused a real and immediate risk to her life.They have widened the window of time to include ways in which the State may have failed.
Daphne Caruana Galizia died on the 16th of October 2017 at around three o’clock in the afternoon but her final words in her last post uploaded just 30 minutes before the tragedy, still haunt us till this day, and they are definitely not fake news; “There are crooks everywhere.”
Previously published on Medium.com : https://medium.com/clippings-autumn-2019/was-is-it-all-fake-news-7b0d9cce6930
Jacobo J. (2017, October 18). FBI to help investigate car bomb that killed Panama Paper journalist. ABC News. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/International/fbi-investigate-car-bomb-killed-panama-papers-journalist/story?id=50541078
Mizzi M. (2017). Malta’s ‘artful dodger’ tries to impress Britain. The Shift. Retrieved from https://theshiftnews.com/2018/01/09/maltas-artful-dodger-tries-to-impress-britain/
Comments