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.

There’s a more sceptical variant of the same message, which I’ve noted especially among people of my generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s, who were impressed by Pilger’s reports when we were young and he was at the height of his fame. It runs like this: though Pilger descended in later years into apologetics for repressive regimes, he was once a principled and vital foe of oppression and human rights abuses, and it is this side of his work that deserves to be remembered.

The dichotomy is unfortunately not raised at all in an obsequious and evasive Guardian obituary by Anthony Hayward, from which you will learn little, but more thoughtful admirers of Pilger are exercised by this question and do pose it. What made Pilger, the famed voice of radical conscience, go from his celebrated series of films on the plight of Cambodia to his defence of Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin and his furious denial of their amply documented war crimes?

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.

There is no diplomatic way of saying it but, in his journalism, Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster. And I use those terms in the strict sense that he said things he knew to be untrue, and withheld things he knew to be true and material, and did it for decades, for ideological reasons. If you know where to look, you’ll uncover his inspiration.

In 1983, the newly established Channel 4 broadcast a series of interviews by Pilger with people who, in his words, ‘have challenged orthodox ideas that lead us in the same direction’; additionally, ‘he or she must have demonstrated the courage of his or her convictions’.

The series was titled The Outsiders. Some of the interviewees were genuinely courageous or at least of real historical weight and importance. They included Salman Rushdie, Jessica Mitford and the redoubtable anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman. And there was also an interviewee called Wilfred Burchett.

Few people now have heard of Burchett but he was not like these others. He was, by his own lights, a pioneering radical Australian journalist, though he travelled on a British passport. In Pilger’s words, Burchett was ‘the only Western journalist to consistently report events from the other side in the Korean War and the Cold War, and from China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam’.

That’s quite some euphemism. Burchett didn’t merely report from the other side: he literally repeated their propaganda and pretended it was news. He notoriously claimed the US was conducting biological warfare in the Korean War. He never presented a shred of evidence for this incendiary allegation, because it wasn’t true. For these efforts he was secretly awarded the (North) Korean Order of the National Flag. Not even the radical American journalist I.F. Stone, later exposed as having been a Soviet spy from 1936 to 1938, believed the germ warfare allegations and he publicly rejected them. It was later proved, from documents uncovered in Moscow in 1998, that the whole story had been a propaganda ruse concocted by the Chinese Communists.

I am not, of course, suggesting Pilger was ever an agent of a foreign power. I’m pointing to the model of his journalistic mentor, who lied to his dying day in order to serve what he believed to be the greater cause. And that is what, as I shall discuss presently, I charge Pilger with having done too.

If I’m right (and I am) that Pilger operated with a combination of evasion, misdirection and fakery for decades, it is explicable though inexcusable. This was, after all, easier than the arduous and unglamorous tasks of fact-finding and fact-checking, for which Pilger was temperamentally unsuited. His obituary (unsigned, as is the custom) in The Times, a more balanced and reliable treatment than the Guardian’s, offers pointers.

Pilger was a man of such natural credulousness that he never thought to check his own story when, investigating child slavery in Thailand in 1982, he ‘bought’ a girl and returned her to her family. It was a hoax. The girl had been prevailed upon to act the part by a Thai fixer who knew Pilger wanted to ‘buy’ a slave. When the Far Eastern Economic Review pointed out Pilger’s error, he responded characteristically with wild and irrelevant invective, accusing the journalist concerned of having CIA connections. Auberon Waugh then additionally pointed out in the Spectator the sheer improbability of this account, whereupon Pilger responded with bluster and libel writs. The case was settled out of court, with no payment made by the magazine.

The fiasco was due in part to Pilger’s vanity, which took the form, among other things, of extreme sensitivity to any perceived slight, consistent rudeness to those he counted as ‘the little people’, and a hair-trigger litigiousness. He was the only journalist I’ve come across who habitually wrote angry letters for publication in response to criticism of his articles by readers. This is in my view an improper practice even supposing the writer has a genuine point, which Pilger rarely did. The letters page of a periodical should be for readers, as writers already have all the other pages.

Pilger’s vulnerability was compounded by the weakness of his technical grasp of almost any given subject. Sooner or later in public debate, and it was generally sooner, he’d flounder. Fortunately for him it was rare that any top-notch scholar considered his work but this was a danger he continually ran.

In his book The Price of Peace: Living with the Nuclear Dilemma (1986), Lawrence Freedman, one such academic heavyweight, noted ‘a tendentious television documentary which had sought to demonstrate how mendacious governments were in handling nuclear issues but which was in fact riddled with errors of its own’. Freedman was too tactful to name this documentary, but it was Pilger’s film The Truth Game (1983).

The gravamen of the film is as Freedman states it. Pilger purports to offer a critique of ‘nuclear propaganda’ but his errors of fact are legion. Freedman, with William Shawcross, itemised numerous of these fallacious claims for the magazine New Society (since subsumed in the New Statesman), to which Pilger replied, and it’s worth digging out the exchange. It’s not online but it should be available in a good university library (you can find it at Senate House in London). Pilger plaintively thanks the many people who, on reading Freedman and Shawcross’s critique, sent him sources and information with which to counter it. The notion that he might have investigated sources and checked his claims before making the film rather than after had apparently not occurred to him.

The general thesis of the film is extremely weak. Pilger argues that ‘by using reassuring, even soothing, language – language which allowed the politicians and us to distance ourselves from the horror of nuclear war – this new type of propaganda created acceptable images of war and the illusion that we could live securely with nuclear weapons.’ His sources include Wilfred Burchett, whose very trade was deceit and treachery on behalf of the Communist bloc. And the evidence is overwhelming that, so far from seeking to diminish the threat of nuclear war, western policymakers were anxious to stress that the bomb had changed everything.