At 2:35 p.m. on Monday, the fearless Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia published a characteristically blunt post on her influential blog accusing leading politicians of corruption.
“There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she concluded. “The situation is desperate.”
Less than 30 minutes later, the car she was driving was blown to pieces.
For journalists around the world, this is the new normal.
With a Journalist’s Murder in Malta, a Global Threat Grows
The New York Times Editorial Board
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/journalist-murder-malta-daphne-galizia.html
At 2:35 p.m. on Monday, the fearless Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia published a characteristically blunt post on her influential blog accusing leading politicians of corruption.
“There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she concluded. “The situation is desperate.”
Less than 30 minutes later, the car she was driving was blown to pieces.
For journalists around the world, this is the new normal. They are rounded up en masse and imprisoned in Turkey and murdered in Russia and the Philippines. In India, they have been slapped with spurious defamation suits when they report on suspicious doings of the powerful, and beaten by mobs and killed for their reporting — Gauri Lankesh was gunned down last month in front of her home. Even the president of the United States questions the patriotism of journalists for doing their job and taunts them in front of angry crowds.
Many leaders see the danger. “If journalists are silenced,” Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission, wrote of Ms. Caruana Galizia’s murder, “our freedom is lost.”
In Malta, the opposition lawmaker Simon Busuttil warned: “The rule of law has collapsed. Our democracy is at stake.”
But democracy in Malta was compromised before the murder of Ms. Caruana Galizia, who had ceaselessly reported massive government corruption in this favored European tax haven. The Times of Malta reported that she alerted the police two weeks ago that she was receiving threats. That warning does not seem to have been taken seriously. She had also suffered legal harassment for her reporting; in February, a court in Malta ordered her bank accounts frozen after she was sued for libel by two government officials she reported were seen at a brothel.
Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat — who has denied reports by Ms. Caruana Galizia that he and his wife had benefited from a secret Panamanian shell company — said national police and security forces have been instructed “to take every step necessary in the investigation,” and he wisely asked for assistance from the F.B.I.
Ms. Caruana Galizia’s killers must be brought to justice. But the most fitting tribute to her work would be for leaders who purport to be democrats to denounce the demonization of journalists and to let reporters perform their essential democratic role without fear or harassment.