Media

In an article for the Guardian, timed with a season of his own
documentaries at the Barbican, John Pilger pays tribute to ‘that most
powerful and subversive medium, the political documentary’ – ‘at its
best, fearless, and able to show the politically unpalatable and to make
sense of the news’ and he urges support for those, like ‘citizen’
documentary makers, who break through the insidious censorship of
‘current affairs’.

As he launches a season of his films, John Pilger argues that, in
the age of Big Brother, television is no longer nurturing challenging
documentary-makers. 

John Pilger reaches behind the news of war and suffering and is inspired by the rise of popular resistance throughout the world: from Lebanon to Latin America, to an unprecedented level of political awareness in Britain.

Venezuela’s president is using oil revenues to liberate the poor –
no wonder his enemies want to overthrow him, writes John Pilger in the
Guardian.

In an article for the Guardian, John Pilger writes that in Britain,
after more than a decade of the New Labour “project”, once noble terms
such as democracy, reform, even freedom, have been emptied of their true
meaning and replaced by a murdochracy.

John Pilger marks the European release of Michael Moore’s latest
film, Sicko, with an examination of why the documentary film-maker
exerts such influence, with fans and enemies alike. “In societies ruled
by an invisible government of media,” he writes, “no one has broken
through like Moore, who breaks every rule by reporting from the ground
up, instead of from the top down.”

In an article for the Guardian, John Pilger describes how he sought the help of Chile’s former political prisoners, tortured by Pinochet, in the making of his film, The War on Democracy, and how they bear witness to the historical meaning of the current campaign of propaganda and lies aimed at Venezuela and Hugo Chavez.

In a speech in Chicago, John Pilger describes how propaganda has
become such a potent force in our lives and, in the words of one of its
founders, represents ‘an invisible government’.

John Pilger pays tribute to his friend, the great photo-journalist Philip Jones Griffiths, who has died. “No photographer,” he writes, “produced such finely subversive work, knowing that truth in war is always subversive.”

The other day, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was awarded in honour of the great American reporter who lived in this country until she died three years ago. Gellhorn adhered to no consensus of the kind that shapes and distorts so much journalism. She regarded governments, indeed all authority, as her professional enemies, and their propaganda as “official drivel”.