PN’s Leadership War Sparks Party Media Backlash Against DCG
Journalists working with the Nationalist Party’s media have let fly at Daphne Caruana Galizia after she published a blog claiming they are “not real journalists”.
In a blogpost, Caruana Galizia published a picture of Mario Frendo, Darren Carabott and Dione Borg – three key Net TV journalists – in a group photo with Adrian Delia, the frontrunner for the PN leadership who Caruana Galizia has accused of laundering money from a Soho prostitution ring.
“If these men were proper journalists they would have been working for a proper newspaper and not for a political party,” she wrote.
She went on to specifically criticise Carabott, who had famously caught the chairman of Pilatus Bank leaving the bank in the dead of night with an employee and several bags on the night Caruana Galizia reported the Prime Minister’s wife Michelle Muscat owned the offshore Panama company Egrant.
Back then, Carabott thought he was trailing a mere Pilatus Bank employee and had no idea his target was the bank’s chairman, Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, himself.
“One of them is such an excellent journalist that when he caught Ali Sadr Hasheminejad slipping out of Pilatus Bank at night with an employee and several bags, he didn’t even know who he was because he had never seen his picture or read his name,” Caruana Galizia wrote. “I got so infuriated watching him run after the BANK’S OWNER without knowing who he is and telling the camera that he is an “impjegat tal-bank” that I sent a message to the people in charge of that particular newsroom – as I would have done to any other newsroom making the same mistake – saying “FFS, THAT’S THE MAN WHO OWNS THE BLOODY BANK.”
In a Facebook post, Adrian Delia called on Daphne Caruana Galizia to put an end to her “crusade” against PN journalists, as well as activists, councillors and MPs from within the party.
“It has been alleged that these people secretly worked for the PN to lose the election. I think it is more likely that the person who is continuously spitting poison was the main reason why the PN lost four consecutive elections.”
But not before the PN journalists hit back at Caruana Galizia, starting with Carabott himself, who warned she is “managing to destroy everything she had built throughout the last election campaign”.
“Although you claim we are not proper journalists, the fact remains you yourself had cited our work – including the Pilatus Bank episode – several times in your articles,” he wrote. “The difference between me and you is I won’t succumb to your provocation.”
Carabott’s colleague Matthew Mamo stepped in to defend him, accusing Caruana Galizia of launching “obscene attacks” on his colleagues.
“I will work with everyone professionally. I am a friend of all good willing people, irrespective of political allegiances,” he wrote. “#WeWillNotBeSilenced”.”
Kenneth Xuereb posted one of Caruana Galizia’s old blogposts about Net’s Pilatus Bank scoop, in which she referred to Carabott as a journalist.
Mario Frendo, whose dogged doorstepping of Labour politicians has won him the admiration of many PN supporters, was more diplomatic.
“So I’m not a proper journalist because I work with the PN? It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’m going to continue working to make the PN a strong and relevant party which can offer an alternative government,” he said.
Frendo warned the PN cannot remain a “pressure group” but must “get off its high horse and become a party of the people”.
“More than ever before, we must bow our heads, be humble and realise we didn’t reach people’s aspirations,” he said.
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