Times of Malta’s republication of some of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s earliest columns should help slay two myths about her.

One, advanced by her detractors, is that she was virulently anti-Labour from the start. They say Daphne wrote furious anti-Labour diatribes for 27 years on the trot. She was, they say, always a “hater”. But the early columns show something else.

Labour seldom featured as sole target. In her sights were, more often, the Nationalist government and pompous men taking decisions and emitting hot air.

The Times isn’t cherry-picking. I’ve skimmed through the columns. Daphne hardly commented on the 1992 general election even during the campaign.

In 1996, it was barely more than that, although that fact has been obscured by a notorious column, published on the day of the vote-count, in which she expected Labour to wake up to defeat. A far more consequential column in that season, however, was the one she published a few months before the election, in which she attacked the Nationalist government’s democratic credentials.

Her sharp criticism of Labour dates, roughly, from 1997. I’d say it was driven by protectiveness for her growing sons. In her early columns, they feature in a humorous way. As they approach their teens, the tone becomes darker. She was fearful of what a Labour government would do to their European future.

She ratcheted up the rhetoric in step with Labour, which demonised her and targeted each of her sons for media or career punishment – Paul in 2008; Matthew in 2010 and in 2016; Andrew in 2017. After she was killed, they were all but called enemies of the State. All they wanted was a corrupt cop taken off her murder investigation.

Meanwhile, from other quarters, there were the poison mail and phone calls, slaughtered dogs and arson. The hard, harsh edge of Daphne’s opinions had arisen out of brutal battle.

This background should alert us to the second myth – speaking of ‘the perennial Daphne’, unchanged over decades.

Her voice changed over the years. Rereading the old columns today, the tone is more sedate, the language more formal and arch than what we were used to on the blog.

If that tone had persisted, she’d be one of the quieter columnists today. She came across as a loud-voiced journalist, even early on, because of the silence all around her.

But to forget she aged is to do her a disservice. It overlooks what it cost her to be a journalist before she paid with her life.

Appreciating her age begins with recognising that her voice remained fresh. To be in the business for decades but not grow stale is an achievement in itself. Daphne kept reinventing herself over the years and from blog post to post.

In one, she could be a sharp financial journalist; in the next, a kind of panto dame, winking at the audience, leading the songs and making lewd jokes at the villains’ expense.

Her powers were still peaking when she was assassinated. Her son Paul, in the memoir to be published next week, gives the blog figures that tell the story.

They say a saint is someone who lives out the truth; a martyr is someone who died for it. Europe, seeing Daphne rightly among her peers, honours her as one of its martyrs- Ranier Fsadni

Her post of December 9, 2014, on a minister’s driver’s shoot-out, passed over half a million views for the first time. Her posts on the Acapulco brothel scandal, in January 2017, had over 600,000 views in a single day. On the day after the election of 2017, she had one million views by early afternoon.

For comparison, consider the numbers that made Andrew Sullivan one of the most successful US political bloggers at that time: a peak audience of 100,000 readers per day.

You can’t appreciate Daphne’s numbers without remembering she was old enough to be battle-scarred. Age means years of being at the receiving end of blackmail attempts and intimidation.

Age gives you the experience to know better than to pooh-pooh the threats. It makes you vulnerable to the knowledge that your family, too, is paying the price of your courage.

Paul writes of his mother’s increasing stress, of which the visible sign was the gain in weight. The Labour propagandists mocked her appearance, when it was the result of the unrelenting, ravaging campaign to isolate and dehumanise her.

In Malta, the rhetoric about Daphne, by detractors and admirers alike, focuses on her uniqueness as a public figure. Paradoxically, however, it may be easier for international journalists to recognise her greatness precisely because they don’t see her as peerless.

They see Daphne among her peers: great journalists who also showed indomitable courage while knowing exactly what they were risking. There is an international pantheon and Daphne has earned her place there.

Meanwhile, in Malta, some of us are still arguing over whether she was saint or sinner, always right or always wrong. Isn’t great journalism enough?

They say a saint is someone who lives out the truth; a martyr is someone who died for it. Europe, seeing Daphne rightly among her peers, honours her as one of its martyrs.

If that’s too much for you to stomach, preferring your journalists to be softer in touch and speech, then all the more reason to demand that Robert Abela enacts all the recommendations of the Daphne inquiry to safeguard journalists.

Without those safeguards, only journalists like Daphne will survive in our bear pit – or no real journalists at all.