John Pilger
John Richard Pilger (/ˈpɪldʒər/; 9 October 1939 – 30 December 2023) was an Australian journalist, writer, scholar and documentary filmmaker.[1] From 1962, he was based mainly in Britain.[2][3][4] He was also a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.[5]
John Pilger
9 October 1939
30 December 2023 (aged 84)
- Australian
- British
- Journalist
- author
- filmmaker
Jane Hill
2, including Zoe
Pilger was a critic of American, Australian and British foreign policy, which he considered to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. He criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide.[6]
Pilger's career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and continued with over 50 documentaries thereafter. Other works in this form include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). His many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963 to 1986,[7] and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014.
Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979.[8] His documentaries have gained awards in Britain and abroad,[7] including a BAFTA.[9]
Early life and education[edit]
John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939[10][11] in Bondi, New South Wales,[7] the son of Claude and Elsie Pilger. His older brother, Graham (1932–2017), was a disabled rights activist who later advised the government of Gough Whitlam.[12] Pilger was of German descent on his father's side,[13] while his mother had English, German and Irish ancestry; two of his maternal great-great-grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia.[14][15][16] His mother taught French in school.[14]
Pilger and his brother attended Sydney Boys High School,[7][12] where he began a student newspaper, The Messenger. He later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press.[7]
Newspaper and television career[edit]
Newspaper[edit]
Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, Pilger later moved to Daily Telegraph in Sydney, where he was a reporter, sportswriter and sub-editor.[7][17] He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year.[18]
Settling in London in 1962 and working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters on its Middle-East desk.[18] In 1963, he was recruited by the English Daily Mirror, again as a sub-editor.[18] Later, he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and chief foreign correspondent for the title. While living and working in the United States for the Daily Mirror, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign.[19] He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985.[20]
Pilger was a founder of the News on Sunday tabloid in 1984 and became its editor-in-chief in 1986.[21] During the period of hiring staff, Pilger was away for several months filming The Secret Country in Australia. Prior to this, he had given editor Keith Sutton a list of people who he thought might be recruited for the paper, but found on his return to Britain that none of them had been hired.[22]
Pilger, however, came into conflict with those around him. He disagreed with the founders' decision to base the paper in Manchester and then clashed with the governing committees; the paper was intended to be a workers' co-operative.[23][24] Sutton's appointment as editor was Pilger's suggestion, but he fell out with Sutton over his plan to produce a left-wing Sun newspaper.[23] The two men ended up producing their own dummies, but the founders and the various committees backed Sutton.[23] Pilger, appointed with "overall editorial control",[21] resigned at this point before the first issue appeared.[25] The first issue appeared on 27 April 1987 and The News on Sunday soon closed.
Pilger returned to the Mirror in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, while Piers Morgan was editor.[26]
His most frequent outlet for many years was the New Statesman, where he had a fortnightly column from 1991 when Steve Platt was editor to 2014.[27][28] In 2018, Pilger said his "written journalism is no longer welcome" in the mainstream and that "probably its last home" was in The Guardian. His last column for The Guardian was in November 2019.[28]
Television[edit]
With the actor David Swift, and the film makers Paul Watson and Charles Denton, Pilger formed Tempest Films in 1969. "We wanted a frontman with a mind of his own, rather like another James Cameron, with whom Richard [Marquand] had worked", Swift once said. "Paul thought John was very charismatic, as well as marketing extremely original, refreshingly radical ideas." The company was unable to gain commissions from either the BBC or ITV, but did manage to package potential projects.[29]
Pilger's career on television began on World in Action (Granada Television) in 1969, directed by Denton, for whom he made two documentaries broadcast in 1970 and 1971, the earliest of more than fifty in his career. The Quiet Mutiny (1970) was filmed at Camp Snuffy, presenting a character study of the common US soldier during the Vietnam War. It revealed the shifting morale and open rebellion of American troops. Pilger later described the film as "something of a scoop" – it was the first documentary to show the problems with morale among the drafted ranks of the US military. In an interview with the New Statesman, Pilger said:
He made other documentaries about the United States involvement in Vietnam, including Vietnam: Still America's War (1974), Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978), and Vietnam: The Last Battle (1995).
During his work with BBC's Midweek television series during 1972–73,[31] Pilger completed five documentary reports, but only two were broadcast.
Pilger was successful in gaining a regular television outlet at ATV. The Pilger half-hour documentary series was commissioned by Charles Denton, then a producer with ATV, for screening on the British ITV network. The series ran for five seasons from 1974 until 1977,[31] at first running in the UK on Sunday afternoons after Weekend World. The theme song for the series was composed by Lynsey de Paul.[32] Later the program was scheduled in a weekday peak-time evening slot. The last series included "A Faraway Country" (September 1977) about dissidents in Czechoslovakia, then still part of the Communist Soviet bloc. Pilger and his team interviewed members of Charter 77 and other groups, clandestinely using domestic film equipment. In the documentary Pilger praises the dissidents' courage and commitment to freedom and describes the communist totalitarianism as "fascism disguised as socialism".[33]
Pilger was later given an hour slot at 9 pm, before News at Ten, which gave him a high profile in Britain. After ATV lost its franchise in 1981, he continued to make documentaries for screening on ITV, initially for Central, and later via Carlton Television.
Assessments[edit]
Pilger's work was controversial, and the veracity of some of his reporting was questioned.[111][112] The verb "to Pilger" was coined by Auberon Waugh in reference to John Pilger, and its intended meaning was "presenting information in a sensationalist manner in support of a particular conclusion".[113][114][115][116]
In its obituary for Pilger, the Daily Telegraph, wrote that "many regarded Pilger as the finest crusading journalist of his generation. He did much to draw world attention to some of the most notorious human rights abuses of the late 20th century". It criticised his 1990 coverage of the Cambodian genocide for not identifying Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge as communists, and criticised his praise for the Vietnam-backed government of Hun Sen for not mentioning that Hun Sen was a former member of the Khmer Rouge. Noam Chomsky said that Pilger made people uncomfortable by exposing the awful reality of US foreign policy. The American journalist William Shawcross described Pilger as "“dangerous to the causes which he claims to espouse”.[113]
Personal life[edit]
Pilger was married to journalist Scarth Flett, granddaughter of the physician and geologist Sir John Smith Flett.[127] Their son Sam[128] was born in 1973 and is a sports writer. Pilger also had a daughter, Zoe Pilger, born 1984, with journalist Yvonne Roberts.[129][130] Zoe is an author and art critic.[131]
Death[edit]
Pilger died of pulmonary fibrosis in London on 30 December 2023, at the age of 84; he is survived by Jane Hill, his partner for thirty years.[132][133]
The Press Awards, formerly the British Press Awards:
Other awards:
In popular culture[edit]
A documentary filmmaker named John Pillinger appeared in an Iron Man Extremis comic book story written by Warren Ellis in January 2005. Pillinger interviews war profiteer Tony Stark for his documentary film The Ghosts of the Twentieth Century.[141]
In Rap News 7, Revolution spreads to America by Juice Rap News, Pilger's impersonation employed his characteristics from his intonation, piece to camera and employed Pilgerist language from 'the war you don't see' to 'the two party system'. [142]
Archive and legacy[edit]
The John Pilger Archive is now housed at the British Library. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.[143] It was launched and based at the University of Lincoln from 2009 to 2017. The archive features his news reports, films and radio broadcasts and was digitised by former PhD student, now Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Dr Florian Zollmann.[144][145][146] [147][148] [149]
In an article for the New Matilda, ABC Brisbane presenter, David Iliffe spoke to Chris Graham, the new Matilda editor and associate producer of Utopia about John's legacy. [150]
Declassified UK published an article about declassified files on Pliger, which showed he was under covert monitoring; commenting prior to his passing Pilger remarked "“My reporting, which was really exclusive, it was telling people something that they didn’t know, it was exposing a great deal, it was exposing the tyrants, but it was also exposing who was backing the tyrants secretly – it’s rather embarrassing."[151]
John's final essay for Declassified Australia on 'why today there is ‘a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda’ as the world's two greatest powers draw closer to conflict.' can be read here[152]