Four things the book A Death in Malta teaches us about journalism in Europe

When you’re an author from a tiny island in the Mediterranean, having the likes of Angelina Jolie and Anne Applebaum even knowing you exist is the exception, not the norm. Having them send in blurbs for your book is even more unthinkable, but that’s what both of them did for Paul Caruana Galizia’s first book, A Death in Malta. It’s testament to Caruana Galizia’s daily perseverance since 14:58 on the 16^th of October 2017, when his mother was killed in one of the most notable assassinations in Europe’s recent history.

The youngest of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s three sons features the events leading up to his mother’s brutal murder and the aftermath that followed in his new book. The result is a 300 page look at what can go wrong when Europe ignores all the warning signs that a journalist is in peril, but it also teaches European journalists what can go right when they break glass ceilings and speak truth to power.

1. Discovering our early influences

Following a condensed history of Malta, A Death in Malta quickly zooms in on a 19-year-old Daphne Caruana Galizia protesting after supporters of the Labour Party started bombing church properties. Now they were warning they would soon start targeting school children. As a young Caruana Galizia was chanting slogans in the street, a policeman attacked her so ferociously that five of his colleagues had to drag him off her. A few days later she was arrested on false charges and strip searched. 

This experience was described as “a real turning point” by one of her friends. Caruana Galizia saw how fear demoralised people and broke them down, something she never wanted to experience again.

“One thing that became clear to me in writing the book is that my mother really resisted Maltese political and social life growing up and was actually very disaffected by it as a teenager,” Paul Caruana Galizia told The Fix. 

He added that it was her rebellion against these issues that turned her into the kind of journalist she became.

Her personal experience exemplifies how individual encounters with adversity can galvanise journalists to confront systemic injustices and champion values of transparency, accountability, and freedom of expression.

2. How Euro(Mediterranean) culture shapes our journalism

It isn’t only the personal experiences they face that shape the professional lives of journalists. A greater understanding of the way European societies work allows us to have a critical look at what other parts of our upbringing in 27 different realities (if we’re just counting EU member states) characterise our approach to this profession.

When the President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola (who like Caruana Galizia is also from Malta) was travelling to Kyiv after Russia launched its illegal war against Ukraine, she received an angry call from her mother who had just found out from the media that her daughter was on her way to a war zone.

“Southern moms, you know?” Metsola told the New York Times journalist who was interviewing her.

In his book, Paul Caruana Galizia lets readers in on a meeting he had with the then Justice Minister Owen Bonnici who was insisting on appointing a retired judge married to a Labour Party politician to lead a public inquiry into his mother’s death. As the meeting dragged on, Caruana Galizia raised his voice pleading with Bonnici to stop suggesting this judge, saying “he is obviously and totally inappropriate”. Caruana Galizia’s father wasn’t too happy with his son’s reaction.

“I think my mother would have quite liked me raising my voice at the Justice Minister,” Paul Caruana Galizia said. He explained that he really wanted to include that meeting in the book as it shows how unimpressive and weak a lot of public officials are.

It’s just one of those moments where you realise that institutions are ultimately made up of individuals

Caruana Galizia added

These experiences provide journalists with a deeper understanding of the different working cultures the institutions they are reporting on may be likely to adopt. They may vary from country to country and even between regions which may be useful to keep in mind during cross-border projects.

3. Good stories speak for themselves

Many discussions in newsrooms revolve around trying to improve today’s journalistic products. Should we add infographics, add a video explainer, turn to solutions journalism, or get on TikTok? While views aren’t necessarily the metric we should be chasing, one tried and tested way of getting people interested in your journalism is to find a good story.

A look at Daphne Caruana Galizia’s website, which is still accessible despite not being updated since she typed her final words, reveals a dated template with no unique features. Yet on her more popular days her blog attracted around 400,000 readers – more than the combined circulation of Malta’s newspapers.

A Death in Malta details how the attempts to hack her blog were becoming more sophisticated as Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog continued to grow in popularity and feature increasingly bigger investigative stories. 

With not so much as a social media page to promote her own writing, Caruana Galizia broke many of the conventional rules only to find greater success than most of her peers.

Asked whether his mother would have been as successful had she worked in the US where many journalists cling tightly to the notion of ‘objectivity’, Paul Caruana Galizia told The Fix that such an environment “might have produced a different journalist”. 

4. The EU’s failure to protect journalists

The warning signs that Daphne Caruana Galizia’s life was in danger were evident for those that were open to seeing them. Family dogs murdered, arson attacks on their house, and threatening phone calls were part of daily Caruana Galizia family life. When EU member states like Malta that are sinking in press freedom indexes clearly have no intrinsic political will to change the status quo, what can the EU or the wider European journalistic community do to step in?

Paul Caruana Galizia said that some of the first people they spoke to as part of their campaign for justice were journalists from The Guardian and Reuters.

“And then many more journalists over many many months. In the end, it proved to be one of the most effective things [we did] because [journalists] constantly cover what’s happening in a country, but they can say things in ways that officials perhaps can’t,” Paul Caruana Galizia explained.

He also stressed that one of the best ways to protect journalists is to act on their allegations. In his mother’s case, she first started writing about the Panama Papers in February 2016 yet the politicians she exposed are yet to be even prosecuted. The culture of impunity created ended in the worst case scenario. 

Ultimately, what you get from reading A Death in Malta is a front-row seat of a journalist, who is the son of a journalist, introducing you to his mother who he fears many people only know as a murder victim.

“I wanted to kind of get on the record what she was like and where she came from and what drove her, which was a funny project, I realised, because in the end, I didn’t even know many of those things myself,” Paul Caruana Galizia said.

Source of the cover photo: EP-163356A, Daina Le Lardic, © European Union 2024 – Source: EP

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