Former Labour leader and prime minister Alfred Sant has urged party supporters not to assume that the international media is intentionally out to ruin Malta’s reputation.

Many of the foreign journalists lured to Malta over the past weeks were closer to people who “had every interest to paint everything black”, Dr Sant wrote on Facebook.

That did not however mean that these journalists were "part of a systematic attack on our country,” he said.

Dr Sant noted that journalists were by nature attracted to more unusual events “and we cannot deny that we’ve had many unusual developments in our country”.

Malta has made global headlines over the past month following fallout from the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation. Apart from reporting on the crime itself, journalists have also written about political connections to it and growing international concerns about the robustness of Malta's governance structures and institutions. 

The former Labour leader and current MEP also suggested that the government had to shoulder some blame for the way in which Malta was being written about internationally.

“We left the agenda wide open,” he wrote, “when a journalist’s murder was also involved – something that is bound to be of great interest to journalists”.

Dr Sant is the second high-profile PL exponent to comment on media coverage of the party in as many days. On Friday, Labour leader Joseph Muscat’s wife Michelle argued that the media was "always against us". 

"They tried to twist everything, but the people out there know the truth,” she said.

President George Vella also used his Republic Day speech to address the international media. 

Malta was bigger than "the gang" who had brought shame on its name, he sai.d