In the Sunday Times (30/10/11) there is a long piece sent by way of "right of reply" by Saviour Balzan of MaltaToday. In it, Mr Balzan makes reference to me and it is to this reference alone that I am replying by means of this note.
Mr Balzan wrote, referring to me by name, that I "was and [am] interested in his personal life", apparently because I have made reference in my blog to comments about his sister, his mother, his father, his friends, his staff members, his late wife and, "last but not least", his wife and her family. So confused and badly-written is Mr Balzan's piece that it is not clear whether he is implying that I wrote about these people myself or whether there were online comments that referred to them, but the thrust of his argument is that I am responsible for publicising comments about the persons to whom Mr Balzan referred.
Not true.
Insofar as comments on my blog and "Beck" column are concerned, these are not my responsibility and I have no say in what is published. A mere glance at the personal attacks made on me in these comments will suffice to prove this.
Insofar as I am alleged to have publicised, referred to or otherwise used such comments directly in my blog and column, I have no recollection of doing so and in fact, I do not even know who Mr Balzan's sister, mother, father or wife and her family are, though of course I may know them in a separate context, given the size of the country. Such of his staff members as I do know, I know by reason of having been contacted by them occasionally in connection with stories they were writing. Mr Balzan's late wife was a respected friend of my wife's and I'm sure we had met.
An attentive reader will have noted that I wrote that "I have no recollection of writing" in the manner Balzan alleged. It is out of respect for the truth that I used this form of words, because I simply cannot, in the many thousands of words I have written over the years, exclude categorically having made passing comments in connection with Mr Balzan, a public figure, that may have been understood to refer to these persons.
It remains, however, a blatant lie on Mr Balzan's part that I have written about the persons mentioned in the manner he alleged or that I am interested in his personal life. I doubt anything could interest me less.
Mr Balzan also alleges that I "have no shame in working in tandem with" Mrs Daphne Caruana Galizia and Mr Lou Bondi, to either of whom he does not refer by name.
I do not work "in tandem" with Mrs Caruana Galizia - in fact, we are in contact directly or indirectly hardly at all.
With Mr Bondi I am in contact regularly, since we are friends, and friends discuss current affairs, but to extrapolate therefrom that we work "in tandem" is, it saddens me to say, evidence of a problem on Balzan's side, not mine or Lou's. Mr Balzan chooses to parrot a mantra that has been chanted by a few for many years, but this does not make it any less a lie.
To close, I do not blog for The Sunday Times or write for it. I blog for timesofmalta.com and my column appears in the Times on Saturday.