By Jonathan Freedland

The Maltese journalist whose car was blown sky high was fiercely independent. She was also a member of the reviled mainstream media

In the roll-call of unfashionable causes, defence of the MSM – the hated “mainstream media” – surely ranks close to the top. Bashing the press is now a guaranteed applause line on both the right and left. Donald Trump, who last week said it was “frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever they want”, and called for NBC to be stripped of its (nonexistent) broadcasting licence, is only the most obvious example. Before him came Sarah Palin and her diatribes against “the lamestream media”.

But the MSM is a favourite target of the left too: witness the Corbynite attacks on the BBC and its political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, who famously required the protection of a bodyguard to attend the Labour party conference.

This week we have had a brutal reminder of what the mainstream media does – and why we need it. On Monday Malta’s most prominent investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered when the car she was driving was blown sky high, scattering her body parts across a field.

She has been widely described as a blogger, and she did indeed break some of her biggest stories that way. But she was also a columnist for the Malta Independent and its Sunday sister title (her last column appeared on Sunday, opposing the legalisation of cannabis). She was fiercely independent, even a maverick. But she was also part of the mainstream media. Indeed, her most important story, the Panama Papers and its Maltese dimension, came about through the combined heft of a network of mainstream news organisations, including the Guardian.

Her murder – motivated, of course, not by some generalised opposition to the media but by the apparent desire of criminals to silence a reporter whose revelations threatened their interests – is a timely and unwanted reminder of the risks journalists like Caruana Galizia take to do their job. As the Guardian notes in its editorial on the killing, the Maltese reporter is the 10th journalist to die this year. The New York Times rightly records that journalists have been jailed in Turkey, and murdered in Russia, India and the Philippines. In the US they are daily denounced as purveyors of “fake news.”

But if Caruana Galizia’s death is a reminder of the risks such reporters take, her life is a reminder of the value of their work. She performed an extraordinary service, ferreting out evidence that Malta had become an island mafia state, its elite riddled with corruption, money-laundering, kickbacks and gang violence.

Her counterparts provide an equally essential service in their own societies. Think, for example, of the reporting of David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post who has been forensically combing his way through the Trump finances. It was Fahrenthold who established that when the president says he’s given money to charity, it’s best not to take his word for it.

Fahrenthold is part of the reviled mainstream media, just as Caruana Galizia was. That’s worth remembering next time an activist site of the far right or far left – dishing out stories that are unchecked, unsourced and, in a word, fake – slams the MSM. As Caruana Galizia’s bereaved son, Matthew, put it this week: “This is what happens when the institutions of the state are left incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist.”