John Pilger

John Pilger
File:Pilger New Statesman.jpg
Born	Sydney, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Occupation(s)	Journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker
Website	www.johnpilger.com

John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is a left-wing Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US.

Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a strong critic of Western foreign policy. He is particularly opposed to many aspects of United States foreign policy, which he regards as being driven by an imperialist agenda.

Life and career

Pilger was born in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney. He attended Sydney Boys High School, where he started a student newspaper, The Messenger. He began as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun in 1958 and later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph. In the early 1960s he was recruited by the British Daily Mirror. He has been based in London ever since.

On 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Pilger says "there's no question that there was another gunman".

During the Daily Mirror 's campaigning heyday Pilger became its star reporter, particularly on social issues. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. Later, TV documentaries and books cemented his reputation.

Activities of the military

Vietnam

"The Quiet Mutiny" in 1970 was the first of over 60 documentary films by Pilger. Filmed at Camp Snuffy, the film presented a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War, revealing the shifting morale and open rebellion of Western troops. Pilger described the film as "something of a scoop" - it was the first documentary to show the open rebellion within the drafted ranks of the US military that led to the withdrawal of the land army in 1973. "When I flew to New York and showed it to Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS' 60 Minutes, he agreed. "Real shame we can't show it here"", Pilger said in an interview with the New Statesman.

Further films about Vietnam followed on from "The Quiet Mutiny" - "Vietnam: Still America's War" (1974), "Do You Remember Vietnam?" (1978) and "Vietnam: The Last Battle" (1995)

Cambodia

In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, film director David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. The result was a series of world exclusives, the first of which occupied almost the entire Daily Mirror, which sold out. This was followed by an ITV documentary, "Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia", which brought to people's living rooms the suffering of the Khmer people. Some $45 million was raised, unsolicited, in mostly small donations following the showing of Year Zero, including almost £4 million raised by schoolchildren in the UK. This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including life saving drugs like penicillin and the manufacture of clothes to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear. Thanks to "Year Zero", said Brian Walker, director of Oxfam, "a solidarity and compassion surged across our nation". Pilger and Munro went on to make another four films on Cambodia. During the filming of Cambodia Year One, they were warned that Pilger was on a Khmer Rouge 'death list' and, in one incident, they narrowly escaped an ambush. The British Film Institute (BFI) has described Year Zero as one of the ten most influential documentary films of the 20th century.

Pilger himself has described the British reaction to 'Year Zero' as follows:

The documentary as a television "event" can send ripples far and wide... 'Year Zero' not only revealed the horror of the Pol Pot years, it showed how Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's "secret" bombing of that country had provided a critical catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. It also exposed how the west, led by the United States and Britain, was imposing an embargo, like a medieval siege, on the most stricken country on earth. This was a reaction to the fact that Cambodia's liberator was Vietnam - a country that had come from the wrong side of the Cold War and that had recently defeated the US. Cambodia's suffering was a wilful revenge. Britain and the US even backed Pol Pot's demand that his man continue to occupy Cambodia's seat at the UN, while Margaret Thatcher stopped children's milk going to the survivors of his nightmare regime. Little of this was reported. Had 'Year Zero' simply described the monster that Pol Pot was, it would have been quickly forgotten. By reporting the collusion of "our" governments, it told a wider truth about how the world was run. Within two days of 'Year Zero' going to air, 40 sacks of post arrived at ATV (later Central Television) in Birmingham - 26,000 first-class letters in the first post alone. The station quickly amassed £1m, almost all of it in small amounts. "This is for Cambodia," wrote a Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week's wage. Entire pensions were sent, along with entire savings. Petitions arrived at Downing Street, one after the other, for weeks. MPs received hundreds of thousands of letters, demanding that British policy change (which it did, eventually). And none of it was asked for. For me, the public response to 'Year Zero' gave the lie to clichés about "compassion fatigue", an excuse that some broadcasters and television executives use to justify the current descent into the cynicism and passivity of Big Brotherland. Above all, I learned that a documentary could reclaim shared historical and political memories, and present their hidden truths. The reward then was a compassionate and an informed public; and it still is."

In a 2007 speech, 'Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire', Pilger describes his experience with PBS executives who refused to air the film in the USA. In that speech he claims that Year Zero has never been broadcast in the USA.

The Times, 6 July 1991 reported on a libel case stemming out of Pilger's documentary "Cambodia - The Betrayal":

Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday. Christopher Geidt and Anthony De Normann settled their action against the journalist John Pilger and Central Television on the third day of the hearing. Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood.

East Timor

In 1993 Pilger slipped into East Timor and filmed "Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy." The revelations of this film alerted the public to the horror of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975. "Death of a Nation" prompted an international outcry and helped force Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and eventual independence in 2000. When "Death of a Nation" was screened in Britain it was the highest rating documentary in 15 years and 4000 telephone calls per minute were recorded on the action line set up after the program. When "Death of a Nation" was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony." .

Diego Garcia

Pilger's 2004 film Stealing a Nation told the story of the people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. In the 1960s and 70s, British governments expelled the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago, dumping them in the slums of Mauritius. The aim was to give the principal island of this Crown Colony, Diego Garcia, to the Americans who wanted it as a major military base, from where US planes have since bombed Afghanistan and Iraq. The International Criminal Court later described this act as "a crime against humanity". Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for not making any real response to the 2000 High Court ruling that the British expulsion of the island's natives to Mauritius in order to make way for a US Air Force base had been illegal.

In March 2005, Stealing a Nation was awarded Britain's most prestigious documentary prize, the Royal Television Society Award.

In May 2006, the UK High Court ruled in favour of the Chagossians in their battle to prove they were illegally removed by the UK government during the depopulation of Diego Garcia, paving the way for a return to their homeland. The leader of the Chagos Refugee Group, Olivier Bancoult, described it as a "special day, a day to remember". In May 2007, the UK Government's appeal against the 2006 High Court ruling was dismissed and they took the matter to the House of Lords. In October 2008, the House of Lords ruled in favour of the Government, overturning the original High Court ruling.

Political views

Criticism of Australia

Pilger has long been a critic of Australian government policy, particularly of what he regards as its inherent racism and the poor treatment of its indigenous population. Pilger wrote that the legislation that removed common law rights of Aborigines (Wik), "is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination."

World leaders

In addition to criticizing the policies of former United States President George W. Bush, Pilger has also taken aim at former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom he believes to be just as culpable as President Bush for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

On 25 July 2005, Pilger ascribed blame for the 2005 London bombings that took place the same month to Blair, whose decision to follow Bush helped to generate the rage that he maintains precipitated those bombings.

In the same column a year later, Pilger described Blair as a war criminal for supporting Israel's actions during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. He also asserted that Blair gave permission to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 to initiate what would ultimately become Operation Defensive Shield.

Pilger has also criticised United States President Barack Obama, describing him as "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan." and whose theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully." Pilger asserts, "In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government."

Latin America

His 2007 film The War on Democracy was Pilger's first cinema release and was named Best Documentary at the 2008 One World Media Awards. The film explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Using, among other sources, archive footage sourced by Michael Moore's archivist Carl Deal, the film explores the role of US intervention, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region since the 1950s. This includes, for example, discussing reports of US involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and its replacement by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries. He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were reportedly trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film also explores the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of Caracas rose up to force his return to power. It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America led by figures calling for loosening ties with Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent's natural wealth. "[The film]" says Pilger, "is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery". These people, he says, "describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us".

In May 2007, Pilger co-signed and put forward a letter supporting the refusal of the government of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez to renew the broadcasting licence of Venezuela's largest television network Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), as they openly supported a 2002 coup attempt against the democratically elected government. Pilger and other signatories suggest that if the BBC or ITV used their news broadcasts to publicly support a coup against the British government, they would suffer similar consequences. Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have described the RCTV decision as an effort to stifle freedom of expression.

Blockade of Gaza

In 2010, Pilger endorsed the Canadian Boat to Gaza , part of the Freedom Flotilla 2 which aims to end the Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip.

The Media

Documentaries

John Pilger's documentaries have covered a variety of topics and countries including human rights issues in Burma, Australia, the Israeli-occupied territories, in Iraq as a consequence of UN sanctions and in Afghanistan. Many of these can be watched in full at John Pilger Video.

Following broadcast on ITV in the UK, Pilger's 2002 documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue was criticised in the UK press for allegedly being inaccurate and biased. The UK television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), ordered an investigation. Based on the results of the investigation, the ITC rejected the complaints made about the film, stating:

The ITC raised with Carlton all the significant areas of inaccuracy critics of the programme alleged and the broadcaster answered them by reference to a range of historical texts. The ITC is not a tribunal of fact and is particularly aware of the difficulties of verifying 'historical fact' but the comprehensiveness and authority of Carlton's sources were persuasive, not least because many appeared to be of Israeli origin.

Pilger's documentary, the ITC added, "was not in breach of the ITC Programme Code... Adequate opportunity was given to a pro-Israeli government perspective."

Mainstream journalism

Pilger has a bi-weekly column in New Statesman, which is his most frequent outlet. He is a strong critic of the institutions and economic forces that structure 'mainstream' journalism. In an address at Columbia University on 14 April 2006, he said:

During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?'

Pilger said, while speaking to journalism students at the University of Lincoln, that mainstream journalism means corporate journalism, and as such represents vested corporate interests over those of the public.

He is particularly scornful of pro-Iraq war commentators on the liberal left, or 'liberal interventionists', such as Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch.

In 2003 he was interviewed by the New Zealand journalist Kim Hill on her television show Face to Face With Kim Hill. The interview became infamous in New Zealand. Pilger, being interviewed via a live-cross, complained that Hill had not researched him before the interview, saying "You waste my time because you have not prepared for this interview, as any journalist does, and I've done many interviews. The one thing is to prepare for them and this interview, frankly, is a disgrace." Hill, who had commenced the interview by proposing that the Iraq war was "a just war", eventually threw Pilger's book at his image on the screen.

Honours and awards

Sydney Peace Prize

Pilger has received human rights and journalism awards, including the Richard Dimbleby Award for factual reporting at the 1990 BAFTA Awards, as well as honorary doctorates. He was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize at a ceremony at the Sydney Opera House in November 2009. The jury’s citation reads as follows: "For work as an author, film-maker and journalist as well as for courage as a foreign and war correspondent in enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard. For commitment to peace with justice by exposing and holding governments to account for human rights abuses and for fearless challenges to censorship in any form."

Other awards

Awards include:

• Descriptive Writer of the Year (1966)
• Reporter of the Year (1967)
• Journalist of the Year (1967)
• International Reporter of the Year (1970)
• News Reporter of the Year (1974)
• Campaigning Journalist of the Year (1977)
• Journalist of the Year (1979)
• UN Media Peace Prize, Australia (1979 – 80)
• UN Media Peace Prize and Gold Medal, Australia (1980 – 81)
• TV Times Readers' Award (1979)
• United Kingdom Academy Award (1990)
• The George Foster Peabody Award, USA (1990)
• American Television Academy Award ('Emmy') (1991)
• British Academy of Film and Television Arts – The Richard Dimbleby Award (1991)
• Reporters Sans Frontiers Award, France (1990)
• International de Television Geneve Award (1995)
• The Monismanien Prize, Sweden (2001)
• The Sophie Prize for Human Rights, Norway (2003)
• EMMA Media Personality of the Year (2003)
• Royal Television Society – Best British Documentary for Stealing a Nation (2004)
• One World Media Awards - TV Documentary Award for his ITV1 film The War on Democracy, on the role of Washington in Latin American politics. (2008)
• Sydney Peace Prize, Australia (2009)

Honorary degrees and academic appointments:

• Hon. D. Litt. (Staffordshire)
• D. Phil. (Dublin City)
• D. Arts (Oxford Brooks and Kingston)
• D. Arts (University of Lincoln)
• D. Arts (Rhodes University, South Africa)
• Hon. LL.D. (St Andrews)
• DUniv (Open University, UK)
• Edward Wilson Fellow, Deakin University (Australia)
• Visiting Professor, Cornell University, USA

Praise and criticism

Praise

• In Breaking the Silence: The Television Reporting of John Pilger, his appraisal of the journalist's documentaries, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For more than a generation, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his television documentaries, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes."
• Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration."
• According to Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate and member of the Stop the War Coalition, "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is... I salute him."
• Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation."
• John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed."

Criticism

• The writer Christopher Hitchens has said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I’d probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I’m inclined to agree."
• Gerard Henderson, the Australian newspaper columnist (and a former Chief of Staff for John Howard), is one of Pilger's most outspoken critics and has accused him of "engaging in hyperbole against western democracies."
• The Economist's Lexington columnist commented on Pilger's account of the Arab uprising:

Next up is the egregious John Pilger, who thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are "fascist" ... Maybe he hasn't noticed, but what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West. No doubt he believes they are labouring under some massive mind-control delusion engineered by the CIA.

• The English writer Auberon Waugh, writing in The Spectator in the 1970s in response to an article Pilger had written alleging Thai complicity in child trafficking (whose research was challenged), coined the verb "to pilger", defined as: to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion. The word was included in the Oxford Dictionary of New Words in 1991, but removed from the subsequent edition after Pilger complained and, according to some sources, threatened legal action. Noam Chomsky responded to Waugh's neologism by stating that "pilger" and "pilgerise" were "invented by journalists furious about his incisive and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable of is ridicule."

Chronology

• 1958–62: Reporter, freelance writer, sports writer and sub-editor - Daily & Sunday Telegraph, Sydney
• 1962: Freelance correspondent - Italy 1962
• 1962–63: Middle East desk, Reuters, London
• 1963–86: Reporter, sub-editor, feature writer and Chief Foreign Correspondent - Daily Mirror
• 1969–71: Reporter, World in Action, Granada Television
• 1974–81: Reporter/Producer, ATV
• 1987: A founder of News on Sunday, London, and titular Editor-in-Chief but resigned before publication
• 1981 to present: Documentary film-maker, Central, Carlton Television and ITV

Bibliography

Books

• The Last Day (1975)
• Aftermath: The Struggles of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981)
• The Outsiders (1984)
• Heroes (1986)
• A Secret Country (1989)
• Distant Voices (1992 and 1994)
• Hidden Agendas (1998)
• Reporting the World: John Pilger's Great Eyewitness Photographers (2001)
• The New Rulers of the World (2002)
• Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (ed.) Cape (2004)
• Freedom Next Time (2006)

Plays

• The Last Day (1983)

Selected documentaries

• Vietnam-The Quiet Mutiny 1971
• An Unfashionable Tragedy 1975
• Nobody's Children 1975
• Zap-The Weapon is Food 1976
• Do You Remember Vietnam 1978
• Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia 1979
• The Mexicans 1980
• Heroes 1980
• Burp! Pepsi V Coke in the Ice Cold War 1984
• In Search Of Truth In Wartime 1982
• Nicaragua. A Nations Right to Survive 1983
• The Truth Game 1983
• The Secret Country-The First Australians Fight Back 1985
• Japan Behind the Mask 1987
• Cambodia: The Betrayal 1990
• War By Other Means 1992
• Cambodia: Return to Year Zero 1993
• Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994)
• Flying the Flag, Arming the World 1994
• Vietnam: the Last Battle (1995)
• Inside Burma: Land of Fear (1996)
• Breaking the Mirror - The Murdoch Effect (1997)
• Apartheid Did Not Die (1998)
• Welcome to Australia (1999)
• Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000)
• The New Rulers of the World (2001)
• Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002)
• Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003)
• Stealing a Nation (2004)
• The War on Democracy (2007)
• The War You Don't See (2010)

See also

• Media Lens

External links

• John Pilger - official website
• John Pilger Video - documentaries online, official website
• John Pilger at IMDb
• Freedom Next Time: Filmmaker & Journalist John Pilger on Propaganda, the Press, Censorship and Resisting the American Empire, Democracy Now!, 7 August 2007.
  Listen and Watch.
• John Pilger at Random House Australia
• John Pilger: There Is a War on Journalism - video interview by Democracy Now!
• John Pilger: Global Support for WikiLeaks is "Rebellion" Against U.S. Militarism - video report by Democracy Now!