Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/888285
maltatoday WEDNESDAY 18 OCTOBER 2017 News 5 Controversial, bold, irreverent. Daphne's execution has torn us apart MATTHEW VELLA SHE was an indomitable force of nature. Of that, there was no doubt. Her 'Running Com- mentary' blog, set up in the dy- ing hours of the 2008 election, the Nationalists nearly lost, grew its own muscle, taking her to the heights of the Pan- ama Papers in 2016. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Sliema thoroughbred whose alle- giance to the Nationalist Party was branded back in the tur- bulent 1980s, became her own brand of news. The political establishment, mostly Labour, disliked her merciless mockery and probing; the Nationalist establishment revered her. Her blog was a heady soup of journalistic brazenness. The muckraking was the spring- board for mainstream media to follow suit. Her fearlessness in dealing with adversaries made her a magnet for infor- mation, and then the scoops came. After the Dalligate saga, she revealed John Dalli's mis- adventure in the Bahamas; she single-handedly brought down an acting police commissioner, Ray Zammit, after an inquiry was launched into the role of the Zammit family in the Gaf- farena murder investigation; on Panama, she drip-fed the allegations a month ahead of schedule; and of course, there was Egrant – yet another mys- tery, although one now under the spotlight of a magistrate. But the good stuff was bookended by gossip and un- necessary vitriol, often ad- dressed to targets that had little to do with public life or politics. Facebook, where she often went 'bogan'-hunting, was where a Labour flag-waver could end up earning a top spot in her blog. It was part-gossip, part-Private Eye, part-poison pen invective. The scattergun approach sealed her reputation for being nasty. Journalists too, those not favoured by the PN, were ideal subjects for her readers: salacious or private moments would meet a final destination on her blog. La- bour apologists and partisans wanted her tried for the temer- ity of causing hurt or offence. Defamation suits, the first course of action for the pow- erful seeking to temper her or influence the public's impres- sion of infallibility, eventually fell flat. LIKE many Maltese journal- ists her age, Caruana Galizia made her bones in the 1990s as an uncompromising col- umnist, first for The Times of Malta and then for the Malta Independent. Daphne became a bye-word for the well-written column, and lev- el-headed outrageousness at political mediocrity and ba- nality, but more importantly, a column for the Nationalist government's legitimacy. For it was the 1980s that also shaped the world-view of Caruana Galizia, when the Mintoff administration made little effort at containing the thuggery of both partisan mobs and henchmen, and PAGES 6 & 7