John Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster
‘I admired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met.’ So wrote John Simpson, the veteran BBC foreign affairs correspondent, on news of the death of the campaigning journalist John Pilger on 30 December at the age of 84.
Those who know of Pilger’s work only in recent years and from the obscure far-left websites that published it may struggle to imagine that he was once a big figure in print and broadcast media, when newspapers sold in the millions and there was only terrestrial television with three channels. But he was, and generous sentiments like Simpson’s have abounded in the past few days. Pundits, politicians and others have typically praised Pilger for his journalistic integrity while making clear that they did not necessarily share his politics.
I avoided Pilger's work from an early age, so I'm not familiar with the details of Kamm's analysis, but the whole piece is well worth reading because of what it says about Pilger's lack of journalistic integrity. From this perspective, Pilger's approach was much easier than investigative reporting and there was a market for it. There still is a market for it.
I immodestly claim to have the answer to this conundrum. There is an essential continuity in Pilger’s work. It’s not, as many believe, that his judgment dramatically deteriorated as he got older: he was always that way, and his reputation has progressively adjusted downwards to match reality. Pilger was not really an investigative journalist at all, for he never did investigations. As a reporter who once worked closely with him explained it to me, Pilger was a polemicist who went out looking for what he wanted to find.
Therein lies the essential transience of Pilger’s life’s work, for while there is much suffering and evil in the international order, a journalist’s first duty, allowing for personal biases and partial information, is to describe the world as it is and not as they might wish it to be. Pilger, by contrast, fabricated his conclusions in order to accord with his premises. This was always his method and I will give examples of this malpractice from his output on two particular issues. The first is his celebrated reporting from Cambodia and the second concerns the wars in the former Yugoslavia, a region he neither knew nor understood.
6 comments:
If you look for something hard enough you will find it. Whether it exists or not.
"Pilger, by contrast, fabricated his conclusions in order to accord with his premises."
Not remarkable in his field, then . . .
Blimey, Kamm has got a lot of material there, and he's obviously been waiting until the litigious old sod was no more until he let fly.
People like Pilger are everywhere, of course. The internet would consist entirely of porn if they all disappeared. What's interesting is that it's only now that we can see how esteemed journalists and celebrity campaigners are just the same as the narcissist ranters and con-men selling the latest intellectual fashion. Like you, I barely bothered with his writings, but how credulous everyone was.
DJ - especially if is evidence of an inexact something that is going to happen after an inexact number of years in the future.
Jannie - that's it, not remarkable at all.
Sam - yes his clones are everywhere. Intellectual fashion does seem to attract second-rate journalists and as most are second-rate, integrity is swept aside over and over again.
This crit of Pilger has been levelled for decades, about as long as I've ignored him.
Tammly - yet he made a career out of his lack of integrity, even though it was obvious.
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