Had she lived, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog would have turned 10 tomorrow. Her brutal murder has understandably led almost all the appreciation of her legacy to focus on her anti-corruption campaign. But it’s worth looking at other aspects of the blog.
The blog began a few days before the end of the 2008 general election campaign, with Caruana Galizia openly rooting for Lawrence Gonzi’s Nationalist Party. The blog’s numbers really took off the day after the vote, when the razor-thin gap between the political parties led thousands of anxious people to seek inside, expert information that Caruana Galizia might relay.
Despite this beginning as a partisan instrument, however, the blog soon became an end in itself. In the same way that a professional tennis player focusses on tennis for its own sake – with everything, from diet to friendships, subordinated to the goal of being a better tennis player – the blog became the way in which Caruana Galizia sought to practise journalism for its own sake, to be the kind of journalist she thought she ought to be.
No one becomes a tennis player for the fame or the money. If they did, they would almost certainly fail. Love of tennis, self-expression through tennis, comes first. The fame and the money are very nice but they are secondary.
It’s the tennis that makes all the sacrifices meaningful. Tennis is to some people what singing is to a songbird. They would stop being themselves if they didn’t do it.
What tennis is to a few people, and singing is to songbirds, journalism was to Caruana Galizia. If you don’t grasp this, you will end up badly misinterpreting what she thought she was doing.
The blog wasn’t a strategy to achieve some ulterior motive. It was for its own sake. It justified itself.
It could well be that she liked the notoriety and the power of influence. But even if that were true, notoriety and power were secondary pleasures. On their own they could not sustain the many hours she put in every day, when for several years the blog didn’t even carry advertising. It was its own reward.
In a funny sort of way, the detractors who attribute her writing to some pent-up demonic frustration or witch-like malice show greater insight than those who seek some hidden agenda. At least they’re explaining the blog as a form of transparent, driven, self-expression.
If that’s hard to understand it’s because we’re not used to thinking of journalism as being something that justifies itself. She did, and she sought to be the best.
You can of course question the standard she held herself to: seeking to be the most read, the most loud-voiced, a strong political line but expressed with tabloid clarity and, sometimes, crudity… However, although that’s not the only standard around – it depends on the market segment you’re aiming for – it is one of the international industry standards.
Putting individual errors of judgements aside (which I discussed in last week’s column), deploring the kind of blog she ran is a bit like deploring romance or middle-brow novels just because you prefer crime or high-brow. The blog needs to be judged in terms of the genre it belongs to.
This often means that even her pig-headed statements need to be judged at two different levels.
For example, as policy advice it was deeply unserious to urge prime minister Lawrence Gonzi, in 2011, to have the armed forces join the war against Muammar Gaddafi on the grounds that this would give the rest of us some well-earned catharsis.
The blog wasn’t a strategy to achieve some ulterior motive. It was for its own sake. It justified itself
And repeatedly saying that it’s irrational to vote Labour in Malta ignores almost everything the world has learned about rationality in the last 100 years.
As opinions, both statements are superficial. At the same time, they are nothing worse than that.
The fact is she wasn’t offering policy advice; she was writing a blog post. Had she actually been asked for consequential advice, I suspect she’d have given it more thought.
And to look to a blog – any blog or opinion column – for careful treatment of rationality isn’t any better than expecting Rosemary Clooney, singing of blue skies, to slip in a helpful summary of the physics of light.
A caricature is meant to be an exaggerated over-simplified portrait, so to criticise caricatures for exaggeration misses the point. Likewise, a blog is just that – a web log, a diary, written briskly, with feeling, at white heat. It’s shared the way a good or shocking story is shared.
If you don’t like that, then you should be reading something else. If you think that a blog is a well of policy ideas, then you need a primer on the policy-making business.
And if you’re singling out one blogger for repeated public intimidation – while ignoring the inanity and offensiveness of several other opinion writers – then she must be annoyingly good at what she has chosen to be.
In this case, more than good. With three things, the blog was path-breaking.
First, at her best, the satire went beyond mere entertainment. She could quip and needle her targets like Dorothy Parker. She could take an innocent photo and, with the right wicked caption, make it seem like a society portrait by William Hogarth.
I think her best satire could even prove to be of some literary interest because of the unusual combination: English satirical techniques applied to victims with a southern European sense of everyday drama.
Second, let’s not forget she was the country’s first independent financial investigative journalist, and for a time the only one. She understood money, and used her blog to show the political salience of details that would otherwise have seemed arcane. Her gravest sin was to do this in language that blog readers could understand.
Finally, there was what she called, with humorous exaggeration, in hyperbolic parody of her critics, her worldwide international network of spies.
It was, in fact, a crowd-sourced information network. It was the only such network, on a national scale, not under political party control. The rapport she built with it would be the envy of any international news organisation: it was a platform for citizen journalism, with the discussion beneath each post a major attractive feature in itself.
There is place to criticise the use she sometimes made of it. But first stand back with wonder at the fact that she managed to build it up at all.
It’s important never to forget that her assassination also destroyed this network, striking fear into what was becoming an increasingly bold platform for sharing information. Its destruction should be as horrifying as a pyre of burning books.
ranierfsadni@europe.com