Now that newspapers have become more like magazines, with the old-style reporter outnumbered by columnists writing about themselves and the trivia known as trend, it is increasingly difficult to assess the real worth of journalism. Times have changed. Television news is faster and more visual. It can also be more sensational. Yet the war correspondent remains a heroic figure, the truth teller who observes history happening. Journalist and film-maker John Pilger is one such witness, a highly moral commentator who describes himself as a reporter doing his job.
His fascination with truth as well as the abuse of power has brought him to the world's trouble zones, particularly those of South East Asia. For many he represents journalism at its most relevant, its most honourable and responsible. For others, particularly guardians of the establishment in Britain and the US, he is an irritant, even a career complainer - the Cassandra who won't let go. His belief in the truth has brought him to the edge of muted moral outrage. But that doesn't make it any easier. Pilger enjoys making the complacent uncomfortable.
Often described as a maverick and as a campaigner, he rejects both labels. "I'm a political journalist. I don't see myself as a campaigning journalist in that I have never been a part of any campaigning structure. I've never been a member of any political party either. And do you know? I think that's what makes people uncomfortable, particularly in Britain. If you haven't a political past or an affiliation, it makes it that much more difficult to deal with you."
Pilger does stand outside the norm. His approach is unique in that he bluntly and directly takes on Western administrations, exposes the hypocrisies of power and relentlessly gets to the truth without paying lip service to balance. Too often, as he has repeatedly discovered, some stories simply don't have two sides. The atrocities committed by the Indonesian forces in East Timor against the East Timorese with the complicity of the Western powers, including the British government who supplied the aircraft and weaponery while choosing to ignore the takeover, does not possess a side capable of justifying the crimes against humanity which have been perpetrated there. Pilger's devastating film, Death of a Nation - The Timor Conspiracy (1993), confirmed the fact that the US, Australian and British governments had acted shamefully in their decision to ignore events in the small former Portuguese colony about 400 miles north of Australia. That film, written and narrated by Pilger, is a good example of his journalistic style. Dogged, direct and unflashy. Few interviewers ask probing questions as effectively and as quietly as Pilger. There are no theatrics, no obvious aggression, but his use of the facts and the direct, unadorned style of his questioning leaves his interviewees little space for evasion.
In the documentary, former Tory defence minister Alan Clark supplies some of the most bizarrely revealing responses to searching questions ever caught on camera. When Pilger points out to him that the Indonesian regime has killed, proportionately, more people in East Timor than Pol Pot killed in Cambodia, then asks Clark: "Isn't that ever a consideration for the British Government?" Clark replies: "It's not something that often enters my . . . thinking, I must admit . . . I don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another." Quiet and insistent, Pilger with mounting irony continues: "Did it bother you personally when you were the minister responsible that British equipment was causing such mayhem and human suffering, albeit to a set of foreigners?" Clark stares then replies: "No, not in the slightest."
Pilger explains he is asking the question because Clark is a vegetarian, who has voiced concern over the way animals are killed. "Doesn't that concern" he asks, "extend to the way humans, albeit foreigners, are killed?" Clark answers: "Curiously not." The former minister's arrogance and callousness while offensive also offers a shocking insight into the way power and its abuse, works. It is a subject which fascinates Pilger.
John Pilger sits in a Dublin hotel lobby. His demeanour is serious and intense. Dressed in a light summer suit, he is composed if slightly haunted. His wide pale eyes have witnessed many deaths. This is a not a person given to small talk. Neutral, impersonal, he is also modest. Having exposed the lies governments tell and challenged wrong doers, he never gloats. His righteousness is tempered. While some war correspondents exude an overwhelming sense of self and admit to seeking out conflicts, determined to be the first with the story, Pilger seems concerned, unobtrusive. Being an Australian has proved helpful during his investigative travels. "It certainly is easier than being English or American. We're a lot more popular." Exposing injustices is not an ego trip for him. Nor does he resort to rhetoric.
Experience has, however, made irony central to his personality. Journalism has alerted him to how ordinary people, particularly, the poor live. "It is the history of people." It is hardly surprising that he disapproves of the cult of personality which has taken over journalism.
"This trend of named columnists writing about themselves is wrong. There's so much of this `angst-writing' about now. I don't understand why these people are telling us about themselves or their families." He ponders the phenomenon. "Journalism should be giving us a sense of the world. I think political writing in Britain is suffering greatly. It seems to be more about the personalities of the politicians than about policies."
Pilger's career has coincided with the history of the last 35 years, including the Vietnam war, Cambodia, events in Burma, South Africa, the rise of Civil Rights in the US, East Timor, the long, hidden agony of Australian Aborigines, Israel. He has made 50 documentaries - five about Cambodia. He was present on that night in 1968 when the murdered US president's younger brother was gunned down in the back kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Pilger saw Robert Kennedy die.
He also chronicled the passing of the British mining industry and watched racism in action in London, noting how few racist attacks are reported "in newspapers or on television, let alone to the police". In 1980, shortly before leaving England for Phnom Penh, he was told his name was on a Khmer Rouge list. He still went. Has he ever been frightened?
"Frightened?" he half smiles, "I have been terrified lots of times." There is nothing coy about his reply, he means it. Pilger denies being a crusader. Curiosity drives him. "A good reporter is curious."
Obsession must also play a part, but he conceals this beneath his slow, deliberate, thoughtful answers. Anger also helps and this emotion undercuts Pilger's volumes of journalism such as Heroes (1986), Distant Voices (1992) and his new collection Hidden Agendas. A Secret Country, his fond, angry study of Australia, which examined his country's history with particular reference to the long, hidden abuse of human rights, could serve as a companion to Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1986). Hughes and Pilger are friends and Pilger's informed, non-intellectual commentaries compliment those of Hughes. Angry and honest, A Secret Country, now a set text in Australian schools and universities, did not endear Pilger to the Australian political establishment. "I love my country" he says candidly, just as he refers to his love of his parents.
Aware of the many misconceptions still prevailing about Australia, he stresses how his country has changed, "even in my lifetime. Australia has evolved from being an Anglo-Irish, working-class backwater to being the most multi-cultural society in the world with the exception of Israel. By the mid 1980s, four out of every 10 immigrants to Australia came from Asia; there is one Asian settler for every two from Europe."
Born in Sydney in 1939, his boyhood appears to conform to the prevailing one of Australia as a paradise for swimmers and surfers. "I spent a lot of time on Bondi Beach," he says in his neutral way. His world remained fairly uncomplicated - for a while. After all, as he says, "the history we were taught at school was full of suppression, omission and lies".
Early in life he became obsessed by newspapers; he was drawn to the sheer physical quality and texture of printed pages and even started a paper at high school. At 17 he joined the Sydney Sun and became a junior reporter. On his second day he was sent to report on a swarm of bees which was stuck to the wind screen of a car. When he arrived at the scene, other reporters had already decided it was a non story. They were preparing to abandon the scene until a man was stung between the eyes. "The following day a rival newspaper's headline read, `Bees Terror: Man Hurt'. Photographed with the marauding bees was the victim, head in his hands - Pilger.
Little about his first performances suggested the nervy, shy kid was suited to a career as a journalist. "I passed out a few times. I remember fainting at a coroner's court." From the Sun, he moved to the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Within a couple of years, he was on his way to Europe and freelanced in Italy before settling in London where he has lived ever since when not on assignment. His son is a sports journalist; his daughter is still at school.
London in the early 1960s was exciting and cold for an Australian used to the sun. Though now difficult to believe, Pilger worked for the Mirror - then a very different paper to what it has since become. "It's hard to credit now," he says thoughtfully, "but in those days the Mirror was a fine paper, respectable and committed to real stories." He spent 23 years writing for it until the arrival of Maxwell hinted it was time to leave. He did and now freelances.
Pilger's real training began on being sent by Cecil King to write about north of England communities. Being posted to Vietnam was to prove his journalistic coming of age. He still views that conflict as an outrage perpetrated by the US government against the American people as well as the Vietnamese.
"It is the pivotal event of the 20th century. A farce built on lies and backed by lies. It told us a great deal about how a capitalist country works. Even recently I saw a Newsweek story referring to Vietnam as an `American Tragedy', it wasn't America's tragedy, it was Vietnam's. What it was" pause, "was an American shame. It showed American imperialism at its very worst."
During the eight years he covered the war he divided his time between Vietnam and the US. "I was like the troops; moving from America to Vietnam and back and so on." Being based in the US meant he had a front-row seat to the unfolding Civil Rights era. "It was very important for me as a journalist, I received my political education in the States."
As a journalist who were his role models? He mentions Morgan Phillips Price of the Manchester Guardian who stayed on in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, "almost alone, almost starved, trying to report the Allied invasion". At the mention of John Reed's name, he nods: "Yes. Certainly he made a valuable contribution, But he wasn't a reporter. He was a compassionate observer." Pilger also refers to one of the first war correspondents, William Howard Russell, who reported on the Crimean war. Russell attempted the impossible, reporting the horrific blunders and empty gestures which were concealed behind the Victorian jingoism. Supported by his editor, John Delane of the Times, Russell did tell the truth. Both he and Delane were accused of treason.
Another of Pilger's journalistic icons is the late Martha Gellhorn who had, over the years, become a friend. "Three days before she died she wanted to go down and see the Inner Temple in London. She'd never been there. So close to death, but always curious." The glamour of Gellhorn's life tends to overshadow the quality of her work. "She was sent out by Roosevelt to see how the New Deal was working and she travelled through post-Depression America. The book that came of it, The Trouble I've Seen is a classic, a companion to The Grapes Of Wrath." At its best, Pilger believes, journalism is the history of tomorrow. "I think responsible journalism is as reliable as history." Unlike many journalists who prefer to be called writers, Pilger not for the first time says, "I'm a reporter". His father, whose family was German, worked as a boy in the coal mines. Claude Pilger also experienced anti-German feeling at first hand. His origins did not impress his in-laws either. His wife Elsie married him against her family's wishes. One of nine children, she graduated from Sydney University in 1920 and became a school teacher. It was not until he was a teenager that John Pilger discovered his mother's family were descended from Francis McCarthy, a Roscommon man who had arrived in Australia in 1820 on a convict ship. McCarthy was to marry Mary Palmer, a scullery servant in a London house who had been transported for life in 1821.
When working on Heroes, Pilger interviewed his parents. They had separated years before but he remained close to both of them. During his mother's last years she suffered a stroke which destroyed her speech-memory. It made conversation impossible, until a doctor asked Pilger if she had spoken other languages. "She had been a French teacher. So I spoke French to her and she responded. Her memory of that language had remained fairly intact."
Considering the many horrors against humanity which have occurred throughout history, it still defies belief how the invasion of East Timor in 1975 and subsequent genocide of 200,000 remained a secret for so long, particularly in our media age. This was due to the cynical cover-up agreed by the major powers, a complicity heightened by the oil reserves of the Timor Sea. Timothy Mo's novel The Redundancy Of Courage (1991) helped to begin the process of opening the West's eyes. So did people like Pilger who went to East Timor in 1993 to work on his documentary which focused on the Dili massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery.
Tom Hyland, co-ordinator of The East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign, recalls collecting Pilger from Knock Airport in May 1996. They were both taking part in the AFRI Great Famine Walk from Doolough to Louisburg. "I was chatting to him on the bus on the way out to the starting point of the walk," says Hyland. "I asked him: `do you realise what it means to human rights activists to have journalists like yourself championing the cause?' " Pilger lobbed back the compliment, replying "In fact it's the opposite. Do you know what it's like for journalists to have a receptive audience?"
Pilger has often been attacked as too serious, too relentless, too tireless. His documentaries are shown in about 30 countries each year, but rarely in the US. His views of American imperialism are widely known. But he has experienced almost as much criticism in England. His natural expression is one of worry. But Pilger stresses he is not cynical about people whatever about politicians.
"I'm an optimist," he says summoning up his famous half smile. Conflict continues around the world and, as in the case of East Timor - a small country which many people can't find on a map - the public's attention span is short-lived. A story is major news and then the focus shifts elsewhere. He does not rush to accuse the public of indifference. "Life is busy, people don't have time." People he adds are quick to respond to tragedies and he recalls the reaction to his East Timor film.
"It was screened late at night. But for a couple of hours after it we were receiving 4,000 phone calls a minute on the various phone-in lines. People were shocked and wanted to know more." Pilger works hard to remain so well-informed. He is a natural researcher. "I have good sources. I don't depend on mainstream newspapers. I make check calls. I'm always reading." Essential to his method has been an insistence on visiting the trouble areas. "You can't hope to arrive at any level of understanding without being to a place."
Although his commentaries have spanned the international political spectrum, his special interest has always been South East Asia. "Because of Australia's proximity to it. Also because I have never been that fascinated with Europe. I have always looked more to the developing world where the real story is about people just trying to have an ordinary decent life."
Hidden Agendas by John Pilger is published by Vintage. Price: £9.99 in UK.
The second annual East Timor Campaign and Trocaire Domingos Segurado Human Rights Education Award is being presented tonight at the Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin, to the Ursuline Convent in Waterford.
