Results tagged “John Pilger” from The Word is Not Enough

John Pilger's one of my personal journalistic heroes (although I occasionally disagree with some of his politics). So I'm always happy to see more Pilger articles. There's an interview with him in today's Press Gazette, but I've also noticed he's contributing to the Guardian's Comment is Free section. That, incidentally, has an RSS feed, making it easy to spot when he writes something new – which would be a handy feature of the Carlton Pilger site if they did it, given that you can't sign up for their email newsletter any more.

The ever-excellent John Pilger is bigging up Internet news organisations in his latest New Statesman feature. If you ever thought the BBC was either neutral or left-wing, you really should read some Pilger, just to learn how much it's backed the governments of the day over the years.

It's Sunday, so why don't we look at what's been in some of this week's magazines?

The Economist and the New Statesman both had articles on Venezuela which came to surprisingly similar conclusions in some respects. Both magazines concluded Chávez's treatment of the foreign oil companies drilling in Venezuela was reasonably justified. Odd that, given that New Statesman's article was written by the highly left-wing John Pilger and The Economist is pretty much a standard-bearer for right-wing neo-liberal economics. I guess the one thing we can conclude is the oil companies had it coming.

New Statesman is an odd magazine that proves the rule that 90% of everything is rubbish. Apart from the Pilger piece, there were only a couple of stand-out pieces: new columnist Ziauddin Sardar's look at Hizb ut-Tahrir; and Charlotte Raven's review of Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? a book I suspect, despite my best attempts at sunniness and optimism, will be a must-have on my Christmas present list. Otherwise, pretty much everything in NS was as the book suggested. It's the first time I've ever read it through, other than to skim bits in WH Smith, so I might try their trial offer (13 issues for £4.99) and see if it grows on me.

The ever-excellent Economist also had an intriguing article on language development, which raises as many questions, if not more, than it answers. The only thing more surprising was that New Scientist didn't cover the study to perk up what was a relatively limp issue this week.

Last item of note this week was from The Guardian's Bad Science, looking at why the BBC's science coverage in the news is so embarrassingly bad. The particular story cited took my breath away in its science-fiction stupidity. How can they let this rubbish on the air?!

Oh well.

If you've not picked it up yet, rush off to Amazon to buy the paperback version of John Pilger's Tell Me No Lies, a collection of the best of investigative journalism from the last century. Pilger has rooted around to find articles that exposed terrible injustices and secrets that are now common knowledge, thanks to the efforts of hard-working journalists. Equally importantly, they are pieces that have stood up to the unforgiving power of hindsight, which can so often reveal something that once had power as being naïve and shallow in the context of history.

It's hard to single out any one piece as being the highlight, when there's Martha Gellhorn's eye-witness accounts of Dachau, Edward R Murrow's indictment of McCarthyism (re-enacted in the forthcoming George Clooney movie Good Night and Good Luck), and Seymour Hersh's famous exposé of the massacre at My Lai. But it's at least a fitting tribute to Paul Foot that his investigation into the Lockerbie cover-up should be included in the volume.

Strangely, Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage, the most famous piece of investigative journalism ever, doesn't make it into the volume because it was “detective work” and didn't “bear witness and investigate ideas”. This seems a poor excuse, although the piecemeal nature of the Watergate investigation meant that it wasn't prone to long analysis or good writing – it was just solid, outstanding news reporting.

If you don't like Pilger, this is still worth a read, since there's only one article of his in the book: Year Zero, one of his many exposures of the iniquities of Cambodian life during the 1970s. And even his greatest detractors wouldn't object to that particular piece of altruism.

Read it: it'll remind you why journalism is still important. If it stops, as Pilger's prologue hopes, anyone becoming a journalist so they can be the next 3am girl and instead points them on the same career path as Robert Fisk, et al, then all the better.