John Pilger warns that the documentary form is an endangered species

BRITAIN remains one of the few countries where documentaries are
still shown on mainstream television in the hours when most people are
awake. But documentaries that go against the received wisdom and inform
are becoming an endangered species, at the very time we need them most.
That will be a tragedy; for viewers in this country are not only used to
but support an eclectic range of programmes, unlike the United States
where people expect television to be little more than a shopping mall
with buskers. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Channel, a parody of journalism, fits
this perfectly; and he wants us to have the same.

In survey after survey, when people are asked what they would like
more of on television; they say documentaries. I don’t believe they mean
cod-documentaries about airports and estate agents. Nor do they mean a
type of “current affairs” that is a platform for politicians and
establishment “experts” and merely gestures at the truth, striking a
specious balance between great power and its victims, between oppressors
and the oppressed. They mean what James Cameron called “truth telling
journalism captured on film”: documentaries that are the antithesis of
news: that strip away the facades of “official truth” and rescue
unpalatable facts and historical context from the memory hole to which
“impartial” news has consigned them. The Indian writer Vandana Shiva had
this in mind when she described, “the insurrection of subjugated
knowledge” against the “dominant knowledge” of rapacious power. Had it
not been for Death on the Rock and John Ware’s A Licence to Murder, many
of us would not have known the secret criminal role of the British
state in the war in Northern Ireland.

The opponents of this kind of truly independent television journalism
have never been better organised or more vocal. My last two
documentaries for ITV, Breaking the Silence and Palestine is still the
Issue, were subjected to orchestrated, political, often vicious
campaigns of complaint, originating mainly in America where neither film
was shown. The Independent Television Commission investigated
nevertheless, and my producer and I had to explain and justify almost
every sequence, fact and source. The process took a total of six months,
at the end of which the ITC concluded that both films were balanced,
fair and accurate; the Palestine film was praised for “the thoroughness
of its research and its integrity”. The would-be censors are not only
the frenetic emailers of the American Zionist groups, but also those
liberal establishment journalists in this country campaigning to rescue a
discredited prime minister. These tribunes have been in print lately
bemoaning the media’s influence over “politics” (they mean Blair’s lies
over Iraq) and demanding that journalists return to “basic values”
(self-censorship). Ron Nail’s report for the BBC, a reaction to the
Hutton whitewash, is part of this; BBC journalists who offend the
government had better watch out.

The looking-glass aspect of all this is that the great majority of
the British media, especially the BBC, dutifully channelled and echoed
the government’s pre-invasion lies, instead of challenging and exposing
them, as journalists in a real democracy should do. According to Charles
Lewis, the former star American television journalist now running an
independent investigative unit in Washington, the Center for Public
Integrity, Iraq would not have been attacked had American journalists
done their job and alerted the public to the fakery of Bush and Blair.

Can that be said of British journalism? Not quite; the Independent
and the Daily Mirror broke ranks and, now and then, the Guardian. But
British broadcasting, the source of most people’s information, was
largely embedded and supine, with honourable exceptions like ITV’s Terry
Lloyd, who paid with his life. However, of all the world’s major
broadcasters, according to a Media Tenor study, the BBC covered anti-war
dissent less than all of them – less than even the American networks.
In other words, the views of the majority of Britons were ignored. All
that stuff about impartiality is, of course, stuff. The BBC, in its
language, emphasis and omissions, has supported every war in memory.
Post-Hutton, even its honourable exceptions are silent.

As I see it, only documentaries can make sense of the “war on
terror”, of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and the other impositions of rampant
power that now touch all our lives. And yet within the industry, there
is a resistance to documentaries that has a familiar echo: “They don’t
rate”. As Channel Four has found, they have often rated better than
certain game shows and “reality” programmes. But that is not the point.
Documentaries do rate in a way that cries out for recognition. Death of a
Nation: the Timor Conspiracy, which I made in 1994 with David Munro,
was followed by phone calls from the public at the rate of 4,000 calls a
minute, according to BT, and this continued well after midnight. When
an updated version was shown four years later, more than 150,000 calls
were registered within 25 seconds of the credits. This grew to half a
million within the hour. And this was a film about a tiny country few
knew existed and hardly anyone had heard of. In contrast, the producers
of Neighbours from Hell, which went to air in the same week and whose
conventional ratings were higher, received about a dozen calls.

My point is that the quality of the public’s response to powerful
documentaries is at least as important a measure of popularity, of
public interest, as the ratings. That is also true of the political
response. Consider the reaction to The Secret Policeman, Mark Daly’s
extraordinary and brave undercover expose of police racism. This does
not mean that documentary makers can rest their case on the worthiness
of “public service broadcasting”. Viewers nowadays are not prepared to
accept a paternalistic notion that harks back to Lord Reith, the BBC’s
founder and author of inspired forms of establishment propaganda. That
endures, alongside a corporatism exemplified by the values of Murdoch,
which Blair promised to uphold long before he came to power. In recently
announcing “less intrusion”, the government’s new regulator, Ofcom, is
making good on that promise. Viewers deserve better; and true
documentary makers, indeed all broadcasters, have a special
responsibility to fight their corner as never before.

The ITV News Channel will begin a season of weekly John Pilger
documentaries on July 11, at 9pm. The first is Paying the Price, about
the effects of economic sanctions on the children of Iraq. In the
autumn, Jonathan Cape will publish John Pilger’s new book, Tell Me No
Lies: Investigative journalism and its triumphs.