John Pilger, controversial campaigning journalist and documentary maker – obituary

John Pilger, who has died aged 84, was a journalist and documentary maker for whom the word uncompromising might have been invented; he was also probably the only one to inspire his own neologism; in 1991 the Oxford English Dictionary of New Words included the verb “to Pilger”, which it defined as “to conduct journalism in a manner supposedly characteristic of (Australian author and journalist) John Pilger”.

The term had been coined by the conservative journalist and satirist Auberon Waugh, who explained that “it means when anybody who wants to make a good argument shouts and waves his arms about a lot and, oh, vaguely blames you for murdering Vietnamese babies.” For AA Gill it was “a particularly monotonous, self-righteous, partial and ism-bound view of the world, posing as journalism”. It should perhaps be pointed out, for students of etymology, that Waugh also coined the terms pilgerism, pilgered, pilgering, pilgerish, pilgerise, pilgeristic, pilgeresque, pilgerite, pilgeration and even pilgerama.

Yet 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, winning a slew of humanitarian and journalism awards, including Journalist of the Year (twice), the United Nations Media Peace Prize, the Bafta Richard Dimbleby Award for factual reporting, the Sydney Peace Prize and numerous honorary doctorates.

In 1970 his World in Action documentary, “The Quiet Mutiny”, exposed a rebellion within the US army at the time of the Vietnam War. From the late 1970s, in articles in the Daily Mirror and in his documentary Cambodia Year Zero (1979), he was one of the first to reveal to the world the full horrors of the “killing fields” of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, helping to kick-start a global humanitarian response.

John Pilger in East Timor, the subject of his 1994 documentary Death of a Nation which helped to galvanise international support for the people of the country, then brutally occupied by Indonesia – Television Stills

Similarly, his harrowing documentary Death of a Nation (1994), helped to galvanise international support for the people of East Timor, then brutally occupied by Indonesia, while another documentary, Stealing a Nation (2004), revealed how British governments of the late 1960s and early 1970s had secretly and brutally expelled the entire indigenous population of the Chagos Islands to make way for an American military base.

At his best Pilger would take an obscure subject, meticulously research it and, through the personal histories of those on the receiving end of state-sanctioned brutality, make unforgettable television.

According to Pilger’s critics, the trouble was that he was never content to let the facts speak for themselves. The title of one of his books was Hidden Agendas, about the power structures that “really” run the world. For Pilger the “real” story was nearly always about American (and/or British) imperialist dirty tricks.

In many situations, there was evidence to support this narrative. But in his demonisation of western leaderships (he once described the American political class as “the Third Reich of our times”), Pilger never had a stop button. Thus the important thing about the killing fields of Cambodia for Pilger was not so much the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge as his tendentious theory that their role in Cambodia had been sustained by British and American backing.

In a New Statesman article in 1991 he described Pol Pot (then holed up with his supporters on the Thai border) as one of the Bush administration’s “acceptable aggressors”, maintaining that “in the spirit of the new age the Bush administration no longer recognises the killing of a million and a half Cambodians under Pol Pot as genocide”.

He presented a similar message in a documentary, Cambodia: The Betrayal (1990). What he omitted to mention was that Pol Pot was a communist who had been lionised by the Left at exactly the time he was sending millions of Cambodians to their deaths. During the period 1975-78, when the killing was at its height, Left-wing apologists tended to equate opposition to the Khmer Rouge with anti-communist zealotry.

Nor did Pilger’s historical amnesia stop there. In praising the “remarkable achievement of the Cambodian people” under the Vietnam-backed (and therefore praiseworthy) Hun Sen government, which came to power in 1978, he forgot to mention that Hun Sen and many other members of the ruling clique were former members of the Khmer Rouge who had held senior positions of power when the killing fields were filling with corpses – and that they were still being accused of human rights abuses.

John Pilger in his documentary The War on Democracy – Television Stills

Similarly, in his 2007 film The War on Democracy (which won Best Documentary at the 2008 One World Media Awards), about the damage done to Latin American countries by the US’s foreign policies, Pilger’s interview with the Left-wing Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez was described in the normally sympathetic New Statesman as “one of the most toe-curlingly obsequious episodes in modern cinema, putting to shame any run-of-the-mill Hollywood political toadie”.

Pilger was contemptuous of that shibboleth of British journalism, the objective news story. His approach was to adopt a view about a situation and then find the interviews, facts and images to back it up. His critics, however, complained that when the facts did not say what Pilger wanted them to say, he was prepared to invent them.

In 1982 the Daily Mirror printed a dramatic story by Pilger about a young Thai girl, called Sunee, who had been forced to work as a slave in appalling conditions before being rescued by Pilger and reunited with her grateful family in a village outside Bangkok. But soon after, the Thai press claimed that Sunee the slave girl did not exist.

As the story began to unravel (Auberon Waugh gleefully claimed that Pilger had been hoaxed), Pilger at first blamed a CIA plot to discredit him. But the truth was more pedestrian. Sunee, it turned out, was the daughter of a taxi driver whose “identity” as a child slave worker had been fabricated by a local “fixer” hired by Pilger’s research team.

In his 1990 documentary about Cambodia, Pilger alleged that the British Government was providing “direct” assistance to Pol Pot and had sanctioned the training by the SAS of Khmer Rouge forces in minelaying and other techniques. Subsequently two SAS officers identified in the report as having been involved accepted “very substantial” libel damages in the High Court. An investigation by the Evening Standard established that Pilger had neither met nor spoken to the men before he faced them in court.

Yet child labour did exist in Thailand, and in 1991 John Major’s government was forced to admit that the SAS had indeed been involved in training Cambodian guerrilla groups (though not, it seems, the Khmer Rouge). The irony was that underneath what one critic called Pilger’s “Dave Spartism”, there was usually a good story struggling to get out. But Pilger was always so obviously grinding axes that his message was easy to resist.

Noam Chomsky once said that people mocked Pilger because they were uncomfortable with the awful reality of US foreign policy; but the journalist William Shawcross, who himself did much to expose the Nixon-Kissinger “secret war” in Cambodia, felt that Pilger was “dangerous to the causes which he claims to espouse”. Comparing Pilger to Henry Kissinger, he observed that “both men enjoy a ‘fabulous’ reputation; each … has a record for ‘greatness’ which, in my view, does not withstand examination.”

For Auberon Waugh, meanwhile, Pilger was simply “just another conceited hack like the rest of us.”

John Richard Pilger was born on October 9 1939 in Sydney, Australia. His father, from a German family, had worked as a boy in the coal mines; his mother was a schoolteacher and the descendant of a convict. Pilger grew up in Bondi and was educated at Sydney Boys’ High School, where he swam and rowed for the school and started a newspaper.

At 17 he joined the Sydney Sun as a junior reporter, but became the story himself on his second day when, sent to report on a swarm of bees, he was stung between the eyes. The following day a rival newspaper carried a photograph of the rookie journalist with his head in his hands under the banner headline “Bees Terror: Man Hurt”.

From the Sun, Pilger moved to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, but within a couple of years was on his way to Europe. He freelanced in Italy for a while before settling in London where, in 1963, he got a job on the Daily Mirror, then a campaigning and highly successful newspaper under Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp. He worked for the paper for 23 years until he was sacked following the arrival of Robert Maxwell.

Pilger became a feature writer on the paper, then special correspondent and chief international correspondent. He reported from all over the world and covered numerous wars. Still in his 20s, he became the youngest recipient of the Journalist of the Year award (for his reporting on Vietnam), then the first to won the award twice (for his reporting on Cambodia).

During the eight years he covered the Vietnam War Pilger divided his time between there and the US, where he marched with civil rights campaigners from Alabama to Washington following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968.

He was banned from South Africa in the 1970s for his attempt to expose the reality of apartheid and reported on racism in London.

John Pilger with Nelson Mandela in Apartheid did not Die, 1998 – Television Stills

In 1970 he began a parallel career in British television, starting with the ITV current affairs series World in Action, and later making freelance documentaries. By the end of his life he had made more than 60 films.

But the main focus of his anger remained the United States, which could never do right in Pilger’s book. In his exposé of the situation in East Timor he accused the US and its allies of knowing about the massacres that took place following the Indonesian invasion of 1975 and of acting shamefully in their decision to do nothing about them. But, following the 2003 coalition intervention in Iraq to depose the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein, he launched a two-page rant in the Daily Mirror illustrated with a front page montage of Tony Blair with “blood” on his hands.

He later called for Blair (“Britain’s Henry Kissinger”) to be prosecuted as a war criminal for his part in precipitating a conflict which had “resulted in the deaths of more than a million people” (an estimate which has been widely criticised as grossly exaggerated).

In 2014 the BBC came under attack from Tory MPs and from some BBC journalists for an edition of the Today programme on Radio 4, guest-edited by the musician PJ Harvey, in which Pilger was given airtime to attack David Cameron and Barack Obama. Pilger had suggested that the corporation should not have broadcast tributes to Nelson Mandela from Obama because he had failed to close Guantanamo Bay, or from Cameron because he had visited South Africa during the Apartheid era.

In a seven-minute diatribe against the “criminal power of our government”, Pilger also suggested that the centuries-old conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims had been caused by the British and American invasion of Iraq.

In 2018, when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury, Pilger told the Russia Today channel: “This is a carefully constructed drama as part of the propaganda campaign that has been building now for several years in order to justify the actions of Nato, Britain and the United States towards Russia. That’s a fact.”

The following year in The Dirty War on the National Health Service, Pilger argued that governments beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher had waged a secret war against the NHS with a view to privatising it.

In his writing and documentaries, Pilger rarely showed much in the way of a sense of humour. But those who met him found a gentle, quiet, rather dapper individual at odds with the image of the scourge of international capitalism.

His marriage to the journalist Scarth Flett, with whom he had a son, Sam, a sportswriter, was dissolved; he also had a daughter, Zoe, a novelist and art critic, with the journalist Yvonne Roberts.

John Pilger, born October 9 1939, died December 30 2023