The pro-Muscat Sunday newspaper columnist cabal

Published: May 25, 2017 at 11:46am

You’d think they’d learn their lesson about making the mistake of typing ‘Michaela Spiteri’ into the email address bar instead of ‘Michela Spiteri’, The Sunday Times columnist who works to commission on propaganda documents for the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and his communications guru, Glenn Bedingfield.

But no. The Sunday newspaper columnist Marie Benoit (The Malta Independent) received a round-robin email from the Labour Party, about the documents which Simon Busuttil presented to the inquiring magistrate. She forward it to Sunday newspaper columnist Michela Spiteri (The Sunday Times), spelling her name wrongly and sending it elsewhere instead, and asks her to forward it to Sunday newspaper columnist Josanne Cassar (Malta Today) and to Sunday newspaper columnist Claire Bonello (The Sunday Times).

Who knows why Marie Benoit, who has Claire Bonello’s and Josanne Cassar’s email addresses and is in constant contact with them, didn’t simply forward the email to them herself?

Maybe it’s because Dr Spiteri, who has just been put on the state payroll as an adjudicator in the Small Claims Tribunal, with her appointment backdated to March, is helping the Labour Party with their mass-emailing, and Mrs Benoit thinks Ms Cassar and Dr Bonello should receive the email director from Labour’s Central Campaign Command and not from her.

Incidentally, Mrs Benoit should know that she shouldn’t use her work email at a newspaper for personal communications of this nature. But then septuagenarians are so often strangers to the rules of email communication.