On various occasions, Pope Francis condemned gossipmongers, likening gossip to terrorism: “The gossip is a ‘terrorist’ who throws a grenade – chatter – in order to destroy.” In April this year, Pope Francis went as far as defining gossipmongers as “assassins”.

The Holy Father accepted that “criticism is legitimate and, I would add, necessary, just as is the denunciation of evil... Journalism cannot become a weapon of destruction of persons or even nations.”

And, yet, in our country, a blogger who dispensed the worst form of gossip, using her pen instead of her tongue, was revered during her lifetime and is still revered by the ‘political groupings’ that gather in Valletta and elsewhere on the 16th of each month to pay homage to her after her most brutal killing on October 16, 2017.

Unfortunately, even a few journalists, mostly found in the Nationalist Party’s media, daily use very negative gossip as a “weapon of destruction”, as Pope Francis had said, “to destroy nations”, in our case to “destroy” the Labour government.