I've Never Met an Evil Person | Mark Laurence Zammit
What if the man who has covered 14 years of crime on this island told you he has never met an evil person? Mark Laurence Zammit is Malta’s most influential Journalist. Before that he spent years at Xarabank under Peppi Azzopardi, where he learned his craft on the hardest stories in the country. In 14 years of journalism he has sat across from the people we read about in headlines, the ones the comment section calls monsters. He has never found one. In this conversation he explains how a story can be factually correct and still not be true. He breaks down the gap between accuracy and honesty, and why that gap is where the real damage happens. He talks about how we went from two news bulletins a day to a feed that never stops, and what that volume is doing to us emotionally. He explains why party media is loyal to the leader and not to the people. And he tells you the three questions you should ask before you believe anything you read. He tells the story that changed everything. A boy the whole country wanted locked away. A crime that made national news. Mark walked into the interview room expecting evil. By the end of that conversation he told himself: if I had gone through all of this, I would have probably done the same. That interview was blocked by court order. It never aired. But it rewired everything he believed. He describes the afternoon Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in Bidnija. The text message that confirmed what nobody wanted to believe. And the quiet shift in his daily life since that day. He still checks under his car before work. He shares the story of a deepfake video that used his face and the Prime Minister's to promote a scam. People were about to invest real money. He spent a week glued to his phone telling everyone it was fake. His conclusion: the collapse of trust could end civilisation before climate change does. But the most striking moment had nothing to do with headlines or politics. It was a quiet statement from a man who has seen more of this country's darkness than most people ever will. After all of it, he says there are no evil people. Only good people who did very bad things. Only childhoods nobody asked about. Only systems that failed before the crime began. This is not a journalism episode. This is an episode about what you find when you sit across from the people everyone else has already judged. The most dangerous thing about a headline is not what it says. It is what it leaves out.
