Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1044434
24 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 28 OCTOBER 2018 OPINION IT can start by explaining why it never really stuck to its original programme: which, in case everyone's forgotten, was to carry on Daphne Caruana Galizia's investigative work where she left off, and see to it that the stories she was work- ing on at the time of her death were brought to conclusion. It seems to me that all 18 newspapers and media organi- sations quickly forgot about their own declared objective… choosing instead to don the criminal investigator's deer- stalker, and try and solve the murder themselves. Which is a great pity, for two reasons. One, it is important for the media to come to grips with what Daphne was actu- ally investigating in the weeks and months leading up to her murder last October. As I recall, in her last three months she had blogged incessantly only about one man: Adrian Delia, the Opposition leader whom she accused of launder- ing money for the London mafia (among various other criminal activities, including tax evasion, etc.). Funny, how everyone seems so cocksure that this was a 'political assassination'... and yet insists so studiously on avoiding any mention of the one politician who would have to be considered a prime suspect in Daphne's murder: if, that is, we all accept the basic 'political assassination' premise without question (something I, for one, will not do). Two: no offence, or anything, but 'solving crimes' is clearly something these newspapers and journalists are not par- ticularly good at. I'm begin- ning to lose count of all the serious errors/misrepresenta- tions that have characterised the Daphne Project's output over the past year. Not only have they repeat- edly got some very basic facts/ details completely wrong… but they have also created an entirely misleading perception of the case, which can only make it that much harder to ever solve. Let's start with the famous phone-calls Chris Cardona was supposed to have received from fishing-boat owner Pierre Darmanin: shortly after calling Daphne to complain about a blogpost, and shortly before calling Alfred Degior- gio (one of the three men charged with her murder, who is separately understood to be connected to the Malta-Italy- Libya fuel smuggling racket). Italian newspaper La Repub- blica claimed to have gleaned those details from sources who were privy to the ongo- ing magisterial inquiry. Only they either misunderstood those sources (language issues, perhaps?), or – for whatever reason – chose to distort what they were actually told. Also quoting investigation sources, The Malta Independent later revealed that Daphne had ac- tually called Darmanin herself, not the other way round; and, much more astonishingly… that there were no records of any phone-calls by the latter to Chris Cardona, either be- fore or after the first call. Meanwhile, La Repub- blica also omitted another intriguing detail: it turns out that Peter Caruana Galizia – Daphne's husband – was Dar- manin's legal representative at the time: which (regardless of the subsequent murder) puts a whole different slant on that phone-call between Daphne and someone who, at the end of the day, was her own hus- band's client. Either way, this sort of selective/flawed reporting has unnecessarily complicated matters for investigators. From their perspective, it is bad enough that details of the investigation are being made public in the first place – though naturally, that is not a perception any media person would be expected to share. But that the details would also be butchered beyond recog- nition? That automatically undermines the investigation as a whole. It creates a gulf in popular perception between what's really being investi- gated, and all the misleading smokescreens put up eve- rywhere by an increasingly irresponsible press. This brings us to the much more serious consequence of this spectacular concatena- tion of errors. It has created an aura of suspicion involving Chris Cardona… which, in the short-term, even led to pubic calls for his resignation, on the basis that La Repubblica's 'revelations' had exposed an unwholesome rapport be- tween Malta's economy min- ister – and, by extension, the government as a whole – and a suspect in the murder case. Interestingly, those calls have fallen quiet, now that La Re- pubblica's 'revelations' turned out to be… um… wrong. And this, incidentally, is another repercussion of this short- sighted obfuscation strategy. It can backfire. Cardona can now conceivably be cast as the victim of a (possibly intention- al) frame-up; and to Labour supporters, at least, that will only add up to one more rea- son to suspect an international conspiracy to bring down their beloved government. Is that really what we all needed right now? I honestly don't think so. I think it would have been much more respon- sible of the media to stick to their own job – which, by the way, also includes verifying details before going to print – instead of trying to just im- pose their own views of what happened on everyone, then bending the 'facts' to fit their argument. Which is why I started this article by asking for an expla- nation. Would it be too much trouble to the people involved, to actually defend their public claims every once in a while? How did these supposedly serious newspapers manage to get those facts wrong, anyway? Their own readers are surely entitled to an answer… if not the country whose reputa- tion has suffered so much as a result. And there have been other apparent howlers, too: some of which, interestingly, also centre on the presumed in- volvement of Chris Cardona. It seems to me that all 18 newspapers and media organisations quickly forgot about their own declared objective… choosing instead to don the criminal investigator's deerstalker, and try and solve the murder themselves Raphael Vassallo 'The Daphne Project' has some explaining to do