“A dead journalist is more damning than a journalist who is alive,” is how Joseph Muscat puts it. He should know. Muscat is the former prime minister of Malta whose government was brought down ultimately by the death of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. This podcast, in many ways, is proof.
Galizia was a Maltese journalist and blogger who had been calling out corruption and money laundering by members of the island nation’s government for years. One morning in 2017, she got into her car to go to the bank, and someone detonated a bomb that blew her to pieces.
Who Killed Daphne opens there, and goes on to document the efforts of a group of journalists to find out who tried to stop her and why. It’s written and narrated by Stephen Grey, a British reporter for Reuters who becomes part of the Daphne Project, a team dedicated to continuing the work of murdered journalists, starting with its namesake. Grey brings in other voices: Daphne’s children, Matthew and Paul, local and international journalists, everyone from the former prime minister to one of the hitmen imprisoned for the crime. Only in two brief instances do we hear the voice of Daphne. Beyond that, her silence — and her brutal silencing — becomes deafening.
It’s Matthew who describes the morning when the bomb went off — the noise, the tower of black smoke, the burning trees, the shattered glass — and the immediate aftermath, when he refused to change his clothes in the days that followed in case it prevented him from waking up from the nightmare. It’s a deeply humanising moment in a story that’s also a fast-paced thriller: there’s a raid on hitmen in a potato warehouse, a yacht chase to catch a fleeing suspect, a cocaine-addled casino owner, a government minister in a brothel.
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Grey and the other journalists involved find themselves checking under their cars for bombs, smuggling hard drives, using hidden cameras. Their courage and doggedness in the face of danger is stirring, and they make impressive progress gathering string that leads in so many different directions. The storytelling can be heavy-handed — there’s little need in such a tale to fluff the listener with baited one-liners — do we really need to be told that the revelations in the next episode will surprise us? But he leverages the platform with moments of profound emotional impact, among them the audio of a lone voice crying out at Daphne’s funeral in a call for justice, before those gathered to mourn her begin to sing the Maltese national anthem, their voices gaining volume as they join.
Grey and his colleagues keep asking questions, as people take to the streets, henchmen turn on their bosses, officials deny and obfuscate, and ultimately a government falls. It’s high stakes and heady at times, but it’s also painfully real. And real life often precludes any neat denouement. There are strings that can’t be gathered, that are still being followed long after this telling ends. What turns out to be surprising is not the fact that powerful people kill those who get in their way, it’s that the efforts of a group of righteous journalists in the face of such power can still uncover at least a partial truth, and that the work of individuals can continue if somebody is willing to take up the mantle. In the end, far from silencing her, the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia only served to amplify her voice.
