In Profile - John Pilger

It's mid-December and for the last two or three weeks I have been binging on the filmography of the legendary journalist John Pilger, chomping through his films as though they were laid out as a buffet of issues. The problem is that I've begun to suffer from an indigestion of invectives, stemming my appetite somewhat for the rich and delectable array of hard-hitting reportage and moral positioning.


Watching Pilger's numerous documentaries in chronological order over a short period of time is indeed a curious experience; you can't help but feel bonded to him in some way as he ages gradually, developing trust in his standpoints and journalistic credibility, and almost mentally preempting and tracing out his particular lines of inquiry.  

You come to revel in his trademark onscreen book-ending of his films, taking the moral sledgehammer approach to any feasible opposition, often becoming increasingly animated with bile as the words of scorn scramble to cohere into reasoned argument, his head jolting from one side to the other like an angry teacher lecturing a disobedient classroom.

I think the heightened sense of identity with Pilger is evidence of the anemic state of contemporary journalism in terms of distinct individual voices. He is representative of a by-gone age when maverick journalists had, not only the editorial freedom, but the investment to travel the world and seemingly stop at nothing to root out a story, of which its hard not to find oneself lamenting. Journalist integrity has been fractured by hacking scandals, propagandising, paparazzi 'scoops' and other such events that engender a moral race to the bottom in the hunt for a marketable story.

It is certainly a romantic view, but watching the early documentaries it is clear that Pilger was positioning himself as the archetypal pioneering and principled journalist; tall and handsome with his Ozzie tan, always pursuing a fresh adventure, he calls to my mind almost a real-life Tintin figure (minus the quiff and little dog). Pilger managed to secure an independent name for himself in the late-60s working as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror (back when it was largely issues-led rather than the tabloid chip-shop-paper-in-waiting).

His breakthrough was in 1970 with 'The Quiet Mutiny', focusing on the discontent and demoralisation festering like a dry rot through the ranks of American GIs serving in Vietnam. It is a fascinating portrayal of the stultifying life in the field, as the illusions of the war gradually melt away from before the new recruits' - or 'grunts' - naive eyes. "Hey man", one of them says, "how come TV doesn't show how boring this war is?"

The turmoil in Indochina would continue to fuel Pilger's investigative ire in 'Vietnam: Still America's War' (1974) and 'Do You Remember Vietnam?' (1978) before shifting to the heinous horrors of Cambodia in the groundbreaking 'Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia' (1979) in which he mourns the once vibrant and prosperous city of Phnom Penh.

Foreign warzones aside though, Pilger honed his stentorian craft through a series of documentaries in the 1970s that were rooted in more domestic affairs. These addressed a spectrum of blinding injustices, from the forgotten victims of thalidomide; the penal remand system; the integration of 
black families into British communities; to mentally ill children abandoned in Victorian-era asylums.

His detractors, including Christopher Hitchens, have tried to skewer him with the rapier of anti-Americanism, in the same way as people have tried to discredit the likes of Noam Chomsky. Indeed, it is hard to deny that Pilger approaches the United States with something of a pre-fabricated agenda, but it is my belief that this is only natural given the scale of influence, positive and negative, that America exerts. However late you may be, once you fall head first into the rabbit warren of US (and British) foreign policy there is no way of climbing out again with naive preconceptions intact.

That's not to say that despite his earnest nature Pilger doesn't occasionally register the humorous irony; in 'Burp! The New Cold War' (1984) he delivers the brilliant summary, "just imagine how popular God would have been if only his image people had come up with a slogan like 'it's the real thing...' He might even have been as popular as Coca-Cola". Or in 'Mr. Nixon's Secret Legacy' (1975) when interviewing the new missilers of an American nuclear base launch capsule, the men sat guarding the red button itself. Probing as to the reason for them both being armed, they stutter and admit to it being in case the other attempts to break protocol (i.e. launch the bomb). The Dr. Strangelove-esque absurdity is overwhelming.

Beyond this though, Pilger clearly subscribes to the ethos of H.L. Mencken, who stated that the raison d'être of journalism was to 'comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable'. Nowhere is this more evident than in his strident tone reporting on the 1975 Bangladeshi famine in 'An Unfashionable Tragedy'; the plight of East Timor in 'Death of a Nation' (1994); or the injustices meted out to the indigenous people's of the Chagos Islands, robbed of their homeland by the British government who sold it to become the largest US military base (in 'Stealing a Nation', 2004).

It is on the subject of imperial hegemonies imposing their colonial will on the indigenous populations, often with little to no recourse to justice, that Pilger has excelled in documenting. Over the last decade this has manifested itself in 'The War on Democracy' (2007), an excellent study of Venezuela's socialist renaissance under Hugo Chavez; and 2013's 'Utopia', in which the shocking and abysmal treatment of the Australian Aboriginal communities (amounting to what he concludes is equivalent to apartheid) is exposed to the full glare of Pilger's forensic scorn.

Always an adept and surprisingly restrained interviewer, by 'Utopia' Pilger's interview technique has become honed to that of the predatory polar bear smashing the cold floor to expose a vulnerable seal on a swiftly shrinking catafalque of ice. 

As the Australian Minister of Indigenous People's tries to emphasise his pride at the negligible gains made by his policies, Pilger tosses overboard his fraying guy ropes from the shore of neutrality by reminding him that he has been in office for 23 years - "how can you possibly be proud of your record?!"

Naturally, this type of approach has attracted notable criticism; in particular, the coining of the term 'pilgerize' - 'to present information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion'. Noam Chomsky came to Pilger's defence, stating that the term 'was invented by journalists furious about his incisive and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable of is ridicule'.

Indeed, Pilger himself has acknowledged his alleged one-sidedness by saying that sometimes there really is only one side worth bothering about. In the vast majority of his film work this qualification would probably apply; justifiably in my view considering the many apologisers for tyranny, aggression and oppressive regimes that clog the arteries of mainstream media platforms.

Although their targets are often the same, Chomsky adopts the technique of an aged and wise watchmender, carefully scrutinising with his loup the intricate gears and mechanisms of hypocrisy and malfeasance. Pilger's approach is more often than not to take a mallet to the watch itself.

Now 75, Pilger is still going strong, actively supporting the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and planning a new documentary film focussing on the American 'pivot' towards China with the danger of inciting a new Cold War. Whilst his modes and methods might deter some, I firmly subscribe to the view of BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson, that 'a country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed.'

One can only hope that whilst Pilger might be symbolic of a now-outmoded journalistic age, the kind of rigorous investigation and truth-seeking that he propagated hasn't been bleached clean from the profession entirely; for where there is continual abuse and exploitation of power we need people like Pilger to be unflinching in holding it up before our eyes.