Has Jonathan Freedland completely lost his mind? Earlier today he published a bizarre Guardian column titled “Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder shows where hatred of the media can lead”. Taking his cue from the shocking death of the Maltese blogger/journalist in a car bomb attack on Monday, Freedland wrote:

In the roll-call of unfashionable causes, defence of the MSM — the hated “mainstream media” — surely ranks close to the top. Bashing the press is now a guaranteed applause line on both the right and left. Donald Trump, who last week said it was “frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever they want”, and called for NBC to be stripped of its (nonexistent) broadcasting licence, is only the most obvious example. Before him came Sarah Palin and her diatribes against “the lamestream media”. But the MSM is a favourite target of the left too: witness the Corbynite attacks on the BBC and its political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, who famously required the protection of a bodyguard to attend the Labour party conference. Now we have brutal evidence of where this loathing of the media can lead. On Monday, Malta’s most prominent investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered when the car she was driving was blown sky high, scattering her body parts across a field.

Yes, seriously, that’s what Freedland wrote! He really did suggest that there is a link between left-wing hostility towards Tory apologist Laura Kuenssberg and the horrific murder of a courageous investigative journalist, presumably at the hands of the criminals she was working to expose.

Of course, when it comes to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, we’ve come to expect nothing but stupid smears from Freedland. This is the man who has played a leading role in whipping up hysteria over the wave of antisemitism that has supposedly swept over the Labour Party since Corbyn’s election as leader. Freedland’s Guardian comment piece on last month’s party conference (“Labour’s denial of antisemitism in its ranks leaves the party in a dark place”) was a typical exercise in political dishonesty which has been thoroughly demolished by Jamie Stern-Weiner (“Labour Conference or Nuremberg Rally?). Now, not content with slandering the left as Jew-haters, he wants to portray us as potential murderers too.

Even the Guardian appears to have had second thoughts about Freedland’s latest idiocy, however, and his article has been edited, though without any acknowledgement or explanation.

The inflammatory title has been replaced with the more anodyne “Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder shows why hatred of the media is wrong”. The sentence “Now we have brutal evidence of where this loathing of the media can lead” has been changed to “This week we have had a brutal reminder of what the mainstream media does — and why we need it”. And a statement that the murder was “motivated, of course, not by some generalised opposition to the media but by the apparent desire of criminals to silence a reporter whose revelations threatened their interests” — which was not present in the original version and runs counter to the thrust of its argument — has also been added.

If the MSM has indeed lost credibility among the left, Freedland is a good illustration of why.