At 2:35 p.m. on Monday, the fearless Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia published a characteristically blunt post on her influential blog accusing leading politicians of corruption.

“There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she concluded. “The situation is desperate.”

Less than 30 minutes later, the car she was driving was blown to pieces.

Image Ms. Caruana Galizia in 2016. Credit... Jon Borg/Associated Press

For journalists around the world, this is the new normal. They are rounded up en masse and imprisoned in Turkey and murdered in Russia and the Philippines. In India, they have been slapped with spurious defamation suits when they report on suspicious doings of the powerful, and beaten by mobs and killed for their reporting — Gauri Lankesh was gunned down last month in front of her home. Even the president of the United States questions the patriotism of journalists for doing their job and taunts them in front of angry crowds.