I wonder if anyone bothers reading Daphne Caruana Galizia any longer, she is so one-sided. I can understand a columnist being anti-Labour or anti-PN but that does not mean that the columnist’s preferred party is always right, the other always wrong. No strings-free columnist, no columnist worth his, or her salt, would write like that.

But that is the case with Ms Daphne, and I truly believe she is no longer credible. She seems to be a puppet on a string. I wonder, who pulls that string? Her circle of readers, if it exists, must be in shrinking mode.

Take her Party labels and big lie theory article (TMID, 30 October). She criticises the Labour leader for using what she called the “timeworn Labour strategy” of going to a party club to give a message in a speech, which the reporters present duly note down and report in their newspaper.

So what is wrong in all that? At least the reporters hear the speaker themselves, and report what they believe should be reported. They record the speeches, I imagine, and write out their story from that recording, or transcribe their shorthand. Is that so bad?

Is that not a better way than having the party, as the PN (and Labour, too) sometimes do, issuing statements about what the Prime Minister or party leader said or did not say, with no one there to hear him except the faithful? The PN, or MLP, “said in a statement” is so common in a lot of the reporting.

Surely it is more democratic to have reporters reporting what they hear, than having the party machine churn out its statements about this or that speech, making only the points which the party wants to make and leaving out whatever may be in the least embarrassing.

J. Bonello

Valletta