In our last lecture Bruce Redman mentioned the name of a man called John Pilger. Both an investigative journalist and film-maker I decided to find out more....
John Pilger is a Sydney-born man whose career spans decades and various continents. He appears a man interested in exposing crimes against humanity and global injustices, issues that I believe should be in our news more often.
Here is a brief biography from the website: http://www.johnpilger.com/biography
Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance 'agency' in Italy (with the grand title of 'Interep') and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the Londo
n Daily Mirror, Britain's biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.
He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain's highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America's poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.
His work in South East Asia produced a iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot's reign. The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50 million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994 documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then occupied by Indonesia.
In Britain, his four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide, and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a special settlement.
His numerous documentaries on Australia, notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream (1988) and Welcome to Australia (1999) all celebrated and revealed much of his own country's 'forgotten past', especially its indigenous past and present.
He has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society's Best Documentary.
What an amazing guy!! He is certainly a great example of what an exciting and rewarding career a journalist can have. If you would like to watch any of the videos he's made here's a link to them: http://www.johnpilger.com/filmography
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