The world has lost a dissenting voice: Australian journalist John Pilger has died, age 84
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Tuesday, January 2, 2024
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John Pilger, a giant of journalism born in Australia in 1939, has died at the age of 84, according to a statement released online by his family.
Key Points:
- John Pilger, a giant of journalism born in Australia in 1939, has died at the age of 84, according to a statement released online by his family.
- His numerous books and especially his documentaries opened the world’s eyes to the failings, and worse, of governments in many countries – including his birthplace.
‘I am, by inclination, anti-authoritarian’
- Whatever the merits of Waugh’s criticism, they are, in my view, outweighed by the breadth and depth of Pilger’s disclosures in the public interest.
- It is my duty, surely, to tell people when they’re being conned or told lies.
- I am, by inclination, anti-authoritarian and forever sceptical of anything the agents of power want to tell us.
Telling the stories of ordinary people
- Like many of his generation, he moved to the UK in the early 1960s and worked for The Daily Mirror, Reuters and ITV’s investigative program World in Action.
- He reported on conflicts in Bangladesh, Biafra, Cambodia and Vietnam and was named newspaper journalist of the year in Britain in 1967 and 1979.
- He made more than 50 documentaries.
- He did this by telling the stories of ordinary people he had encountered, whether miners in Durham, England, refugees from Vietnam, or American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War – not to parades, but to lives dislocated by the silence and shame surrounding the war’s end.
The world has lost a resolutely dissenting voice
- In Welcome to Australia [Pilger’s 1999 film], he concentrated on the bad things that were happening but not the good.
- He’s a polemicist and, if you want to arouse people’s passions and anger, the stronger the polemic, the better.
- Whatever flaws there are in Pilger’s journalism, it feels dispiriting that on the first day of a new year clouded by wars, inaction on climate change and a presidential election in the US where democracy itself is on the ballot, the world has lost another resolutely dissenting voice in the media.
Matthew Ricketson is the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s representative on the Australian Press Council.