Are the world’s top journalism bodies going soft? It’s another month and another international posthumous award for Daphne Caruana Galizia. This time it’s the Tully Award for free speech, given on Tuesday by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. It follows tributes from all around Europe and commemoration during the International Press Freedom Awards.
If you follow the public conversation in Malta, you’d know one thread is that those foreigners don’t know who Caruana Galizia really was and what she stood for. They’re honouring her investigative journalism without investigating her. How’s that for irony?
But Caruana Galizia’s blog is still online. Anyone can consult it. International award-giving bodies conduct routine background checks as part of a transparent selection process. Why should they give her a pass?
My own experience of talking to the international press is that they do check her blog. Their reaction tends to be a sharp intake of breath. They can understand why she’d be considered controversial and polemical. But it’s not her that they find unacceptable: it’s the government ministers, advisors and appointees who waged war on her.
Another Maltese suspicion is that these awards are being given in pursuit of a hidden agenda – presumably motivated by envy of Malta and driven by the nationalist agenda of whichever journalistic body is paying tribute.
If anyone really believes this, I wish they’d tell us the hidden agenda that Syracuse University, a top US university, is pursuing in giving the Tully Award.
A previous recipient is the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. He got it for publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations of the secret surveillance programme run by the US. If the Tully Award was run by an America-First cabal, Rusbridger would be called an enemy of the state, not rewarded.
Nor is the Tully Award running out of people to honour. Caruana Galizia was chosen from among several candidates.
And if, cynically, the Newhouse School had wanted the pathos of decorating a murdered journalist, it had at least 17 others to choose from, among those killed last year alone.
Bottom line: a leading centre of journalism, whose only agenda is promoting excellence and heroism within the profession, has made an informed choice. It has recognised Caruana Galizia as deserving an award previously given to top representatives in the field.
They do not think her disqualified by the content of her blog. They consider her to have been mainstream.
Mainstream does not mean average, moderate or the most commonly found. It means within the bounds of the acceptable. Mainstream includes the tabloids.
It means that, however, polemical, controversial or polarising a journalist you’re considered to be, you’re still good enough to be published in the mainstream media and to appear on (say) the BBC’s radio or TV discussion panels.
Almost all of what Caruana Galizia wrote fell into the mainstream, understood this way. She would have been a readily recognisable type in the UK, mainland Europe and the US: a tough, sometimes opinionated, crusader with no truck for compromise.
Can you hear Caruana Galizia’s voice in what follows?
Daphne Caruana Galizia would have been a readily recognisable type in the UK, mainland Europe and the US: a tough, sometimes opinionated, crusader with no truck for compromise
Bill Maher, a US current affairs talk-show host, has described American society as made up largely of mental teenagers or people who are easy to fool most of the time.
Polly Toynbee, with a long career writing for The Observer, The Independent and The Guardian, headlined a 2007 opinion piece on Boris Johnson this way: ‘Boris the jester, toff, serial liar and sociopath for mayor.’
Toynbee, despite being a strong New Labour supporter, called for Gordon Brown to go or be removed as prime minister.
On the right-wing end of the spectrum, there is Melanie Phillips, also with a career writing for the mainstream press, like The Guardian, The Spectator, the Daily Mail and, now, The Times. She described Barack Obama as a ‘sulky narcissist’ who would lead the US into a ‘terrifying darkness’.
A strong supporter of a hawkish Israel, she has described a liberal Jewish group called Independent Jewish Voices as ‘Jews for Genocide’. She still appears regularly as a panellist on the BBC’s Moral Maze.
Are you thinking of how Caruana Galizia hurt people’s sentiments? Toynbee, who was declared the UK’s most influential columnist in 2008, once declared John Paul II “a hate-figure and with good reason”.
In case we missed that, she called Christianity, Islam and Judaism “primitive Middle Eastern religions”.
Thinking of Caruana Galizia celebrating Dom Mintoff’s death? Christopher Hitchens, feted and published everywhere on both sides of the Atlantic, wrote that the evangelical preacher Billy Graham (loved and admired by many more people than Mintoff) was a “disgustingly evil man”. He added, with reference to Graham’s advanced age and declining health: “What a horrible career. I gather it’s soon to be over. I hope so.” He wrote this in his bestselling God Is Not Great, translated into many languages and the subject of many enthusiastic interviews.
Nor was this a lapse. In 1997, during the week between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral, while huge crowds were still mourning, he toured the UK and US studios arguing the entire public spectacle was a sham and that Diana was an undeserving recipient of the outpouring of grief.
Earlier still, he had denounced Mother Teresa as a fraud who hobnobbed with dictators. Later, he delighted in writing an article criticising the taste of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, long considered the benchmark of sophisticated style in the US. The title: ‘Was Jackie tacky?’
If in all of this we can hear Caruana Galizia’s own voice, it’s not because I’ve managed to cherry-pick a few rare examples. On the contrary, I’ve never been able to read Caruana Galizia without immediately thinking of the Anglo-American tradition (for that’s what it is) of journalistic polemic and invective – a tradition whose best exemplars are studied for their literary merits.
She was representative of a recognisable type in the Euro-American media: the robust, black-and-white, over-the-top opinion maker and polemicist. In liberal democracies, the professional, acid-tongued contrarian is very much at home in the world of publishing and broadcasting.
It doesn’t mean they’re not criticised or deplored, or that their facts are not sometimes found wanting. Interviewers did occasionally find Hitchens to be superficial, cliched, insecure and too fond of his own voice.
But he and his type are engaged, not smeared, by their critics and opponents. They’re not called hatemongers, except by people who don’t understand what hate speech is.
And, sometimes, they are also celebrated. All the journalists I’ve mentioned have won several awards between them. (One of them, Phillips, also won Bigot of the Year [2011] from Stonewall, a gay rights group, which is a democratically more attractive way of expressing disagreement than the authoritarian-style mockery using partisan and government-controlled media.)
There you have it: why international journalism continues to recognise Caruana Galizia as one of their own fraternity, with her investigative work and courage worthy of the highest decoration.
If you still think it’s because they don’t know the truth, it’s because you won’t face the facts.
ranierfsadni@europe.com