John Pilger in Coversation

John Pilger, war correspondent, author and BAFTA and Emmy award-winning film-maker, has been on British TV screens for some 35 years, virtually all of them at ITV. In that time he has highlighted some of the most distressing and enraging effects of war and super-power 'diplomacy' ever screened. With his production team, which for a long time included the late producer-director David Munro, Pilger has confronted those in power and told the stories of those without power. He looks back at his career, in an interview with Julian Petley, following a screening of two of his most provocative works.

Interviewed Sunday 6 November 2005 by Julian Petley

Interview © BFI 2005

Veronica Taylor: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the very first screening and the very first event in our two-month ITV50 season. I'm Veronica Taylor from the NFT's programming department and one of the team who has put together the ITV50 season, and we're absolutely delighted to see so many of you here this afternoon. And we're also delighted to be kicking off the season with something which is in the factual strain. Television landscape is changing all the time and I think a lot of us are very worried that current affairs and factual programming is slightly getting squeezed out. And it's wonderful that people like John Pilger still get to make programmes. And that's another reason why we're so pleased to see him here today.

So first we have got the screening - we're showing two programmes complete: Cambodia [Year Zero The Silent Death of Cambodia A Report by John Pilger, d. David Munro, 1979] and Breaking the Silence [Breaking the Silence Truth and Lies in the War on Terror A Special Report by John Pilger, d. John Pilger, 2003] and in between there'll be approximately an eight-minute clip from another John Pilger programme about East Timor [Death of a Nation The Timor Conspiracy A Special Report by John Pilger, d. David Munro, 1994]. I wish we could squeeze more in but there just isn't time.

After the screening there'll be an approximately half-hour break when you will get the chance to have a drink and refresh yourselves, and then we're back in here at 6.30. There'll be a few clips up front and then John will take to the stage and be interviewed by Julian Petley. So enjoy the screening, we'll see you later... oh, sorry, I must thank ITV, of course, for their sponsorship for this season. They have been tremendous partners in putting the season together and enabling us to do more than perhaps we would have done normally with this sort of season. So very many thanks to our partners at ITV , particularly Liam Hamilton and Marian Woods, who are running the ITV50 celebrations there. So, again, enjoy the screening, I'll see you later.

[Clips]

Julian Petley: Well, thanks very much. I think, John, you're really too well known to need much introduction, but just to say I think there's probably... there is in fact no British journalist with as distinguished a career in both broadcast and the written press media, and also just to draw attention to the new book that John's just edited, Tell Me No Lies , a wonderful collection of proper journalism with a very interesting introduction by John in it. So straight into the first question: John, how did you begin this career in journalism?

John Pilger: Well I began it, I suppose, at the age of twelve. The official journalistic beginning was when a school mate and I launched a newspaper at Sydney High School called The Messenger - it sounds slightly biblical and I'm not sure that it really was - but it bore no relation to anything that I was subsequently to do because it mainly distinguished itself by publishing very hard-to-get interviews with local celebrities. Because I'd worked it out that if you called up people as a schoolboy who were otherwise very difficult to get for the press, they would almost certainly say yes. So I suppose it was the beginning of my love affair with newspapers.

I'm essentially, as they say now, a print journalist or a newspaper man, although I've had a parallel career in broadcasting. And I started in a very humble way on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney called The Sydney Sun , which then had copy boys. Those who have seen very old fashioned movies about the press will know, there's always copy boys in it, there was in that great film The Front Page [d. Billy Wilder, 1974] where they shout 'Copy!'. So you ran the copy down to the printer and you made the coffee. I loved it.

And that was the beginning of, I suppose, a relatively brief time in Australia. I did my training. Australia had a very good training system called the Cadetship and I served my Cadetship and became a reporter on The Sydney Daily Telegraph before I got on a ship, at about the age of 22, that was bringing all the immigrants from Europe. It used to take all of us leaving. And my mother on the wharf said 'I don't think you're going to come back.' And I said 'yes, of course I'll come back' but in one respect she was right. I have been going back, of course, ever since, but I didn't go back to work again.

Petley: And then you came to the UK and you started work for ITV?

Pilger: No, no, early on because I had no money I tried to do a bit of freelancing and I wrote. My first article in this country was for a magazine called Titbits , which was a pretty innocent thing compared with today, but I can't remember what I wrote about. But they paid me money for writing which I thought was amazing. Then I went to work for Reuters in Fleet Street. But I wanted to travel - that was the whole point of leaving Australia - and when they said 'well no' - quite rightly - 'you'll have to spend a couple of years on the desks learning the trade,' I said 'no, no, you're either going to post me now as correspondent somewhere or I'm leaving.' And I did and fell into poverty once again. Then I heard about a job as a sub-editor, for which I was trained, on The Daily Mirror . I didn't even know what The Daily Mirror was at that point. I came with real antipathy and ignorance about lots of things here. That began a 23-year journey on The Daily Mirror - which was revived recently, thanks to Mr Morgan - and then fell with the fall of Baghdad .

My television career then began in 1970 when I was approached by a group of filmmakers, and I believe it was Paul Watson's idea - I don't know whether Paul is here tonight - but Paul Watson, famous for his observational invention on television, suggested that I might like to do what I did on The Mirror, on television. So I started on World in Action, my first film was The Quiet Mutiny [1970]. The story I'd been working on for The Mirror for a long time about the break-up of the American army in Vietnam. And I realised the power of television instantly when this film went to air, because everything hit the fan. Suddenly I was the object of all sorts of attack and complaint and the American ambassador was complaining to the Independent Television Authority. None of these things used to happen on The Mirror . And so a new world opened up but one that actually became a fairly standard response to film.

Petley: It must have been a very powerful position to be able to write both for The Mirror and have programmes on television. It must have been a kind of double whammy.

Pilger: Yes it was. And the double whammy worked for example with Cambodia - the clip of Year Zero you saw. The Mirror published my first two reports from Cambodia . The entire Daily Mirror was given over to the first one and it's one of the few times The Mirror's actually sold out, which I have always used as an example of something that puts the lie to the fact that people don't want to read about it in popular papers. They published in the first issue 6,000 words of mine and something like 32 photographs.

That was in the September (1979) and there was a strike of technicians on ITV. So there was the idea was that it would go out in the same week and it couldn't. It went out about a month later. The reaction was very strong when The Mirror went out but it was even stronger - in fact it was huge - when Year Zero was shown . But what was interesting was that they complimented each other. And I've always thought it a bit of a tragedy really, that newspapers are always looking over their shoulder at television, always wanting to promote television rather than doing their own work.

Petley: I'm sure that a question lots of people would like me to ask, so I will ask it is: what were the consequences of showing Year Zero on television?

Pilger: Well...

Petley: Well the consequences of that and The Mirror together.

Pilger: Yes, well the consequences of The Mirror... I mean all this really - I have to say - shocked me... I mean the whole thing was pretty shocking, just to do it. But the response was, I suppose, a pleasant shock, although there was a down side to it. The impact of The Mirror in those days, because it had built up such a credibility, although it was then fighting Murdoch (this was 1979) it still had this enormous popular power. The impact was almost galvanising people. In came a huge amount of support in terms of just a few pounds in an envelope, well more than that, people sending their wages, people ringing up and The Mirror raised enough in a few days for me to hire an aircraft, fill it with - thanks to Oxfam - drugs and vitamins and so on, all the things that were needed for the children there and get it out.

Now the down side was that the film was also attacked because what I wanted to do - and I've tried to do this in most of my films - is not just simply assault people's emotions... you saw that... it's not difficult to do, but when you start to make sense of something then you stray into what's called the political area. And Cambodia - Year Zero, the second part of it attacked the British Government, attacked the US Government, attacked the UN, for really letting this stricken nation just hang out to dry. By that time Pol Pot had been overthrown by several months. There was no aid going into it because the liberators of Cambodia, the Vietnamese, had come from the wrong side of the Cold War.

So The Mirror aircraft, which was a Danish pilot flying an Icelandic aircraft from Luxemburg, this DC8 was almost impounded in Bangkok when the American Embassy found out, and then flew on to Cambodia. It was the first relief plane to get there. When the film came out it raised within a matter of months something like 20-odd million pounds but most of it again in small amounts. There was the BBC, very unusually reacting to an ITV programme. It started on... what's the BBC's children's programme?

Petley: Blue Peter?

Pilger: Blue Peter, a thing called Bring and Buy and kids raised in under a week - primary school kids - a million pounds, and my cohort David Munro and I were trying to organise all this money and we were sending it to various places and so on, but we then followed it up and made another film with what had happened to it. So the point was that there was the very opposite of what is very cynically called 'compassion fatigue,' which doesn't exist - it's complete journalistic invention as far as I'm concerned. And that still exists among the public, that hasn't gone away.

Petley: You say that the film was attacked and this was neither the first time nor the last time that one of your films has been attacked. Was it attacked by the British Government or was it attacked by other British journalists, or... who was it attacked by?

Pilger: You know, there's some good - why does she come into my mind? - but Esther Rantzen attacked it. [laughter] I don't want her to come into my mind actually, but she has. She wrote a long piece in The Sun saying I was a dangerous communist. The Foreign Office also attacked the film via proxies. They've done it with a lot of my films that have had an impact, such as Death of a Nation - East Timor - and others. They do it by feeding stuff to various people in the press and so it's a sort of oblique attack from there.

Petley: But this brings us on, I think, very interestingly to talking about journalism - which is the subject of your new book. Obviously one would expect governments to do exactly what you've said the British Government did. What I think is depressing is the way in which journalists let themselves be led in this fashion and thus you get journalist attacking journalist. This I think does say something, does it not, about the rather sad state of the British press? That it lets itself be used like that.

Pilger: Yes, although I have to say I did once, a long time ago, kind of subscribe to this sort of brotherhood. Certainly I've had, if you like, comrades among journalists when we've been in very difficult situations together, in physically threatening situations. And then there's a certain camaraderie that exists. But I don't feel anything in common with people on the Murdoch press, and they're part of the problem as far as I'm concerned. And I haven't for a very long time. The press, the so-called mainstream - this ironic term that's still used - the mainstream press and media are still and always have been an extension of established power. The idea that it's a Fourth Estate and that they're forever checking power is absolute nonsense and that's always been the case.

The difference today is that the media, as we now call it, is more powerful than it's ever been. And therefore you have situations like grief by media - Diana; war by media - Iraq, and others. There's no doubt in my mind that had the American media - especially, because that's where it matters - not merely amplified and echoed the lies of Bush, and had challenged them and exposed them - and this is a view shared now by quite a few senior journalists who have come out, including The New York Times I understand - is that that war would not have happened. The invasion wouldn't have happened. That's the power of the media now. It didn't have that power before. It does now because it's so omnipresent in everything we do.

Petley: We've already skirted around this issue of bias, with you being accused of being biased by the, of course, unbiased Ann Leslie. It's interesting that when you first began to work for ITV between, I think, '74 and '77, you had your own programme, which was simply called Pilger, I think I'm right in saying?

Pilger: I had my head in a globe turning around. [laughter] I couldn't bear to watch the beginning of it ever.

Petley: This programme was actually labelled, I think, 'a personal view' slot or 'a personal report.' How did you feel about that? Did you feel as if warning signs were being flashed out?

Petley: Well they were. It was like the health warnings on a cigarette packet. Same thing. At one point they wanted to - it was only half hour long - they wanted to stop them and put 'you are watching a personal report' in the middle. They used to have it at the front and the end, they want one in the middle, they want a ring fence so that no one was responsible for this subversive stuff that was going out. It was all silly, of course. They dropped the one at the end. There was always one at the front, then they finally dropped that.

This had a lot to do with the whole issue of Ireland. The Independent Broadcasting Authority, which regulated commercial television, expressed the view of the establishment towards Ireland. It was so terrified of any of the truth about what was going on in Northern Ireland getting out, that it set up the most complex set of regulations which they then would apply to other parts of the world. You saw in the 80s the absurdity of the BBC only allowing Gerry Adams on when an actor would say his words. That kind of paranoia about Ireland... it's quite ironic because I didn't make a film on Ireland. I wish I had, but I was probably put off by this thicket of regulations, all these obstacles. But it meant that every film of mine was... every script had to go into a censor, basically. The script was combed. I've always had to... well, as Noam Chomsky said the other day in an appalling interview...

Petley: You mean the interviewer was appalling?

Petley: The interviewer was appalling, I'm sorry [laughter] I'll talk about that... one of the worst examples of journalism I think I've ever seen. The interview with him in The Guardian.

Petley: I agree.

Petley: Disgusting. But he made the point to this hatchet person that those who challenge have to be holier than thou, better than thou, our sources have to be better. And I learned that with television through the 70s and 80s, at the beginning of the 90s it eased off ironically again as television was deregulated. It's interesting, I saw him only the other night but my sort of nemesis, although there wasn't anything personal there, was someone you know - David Glencross - who ran the IBA. He's a very powerful bureaucrat. And he ran the IBA all the way through and he used to personally oversee my programmes, personally look at my scripts. With The Truth Game [d. David Munro, 1983] which you were involved with, I remember he came to us and said 'you say here that there are a number of studies suggesting that the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan for reasons other than ending the war. Well...' he said 'you can't say that.' He said 'I grew up believing that. I remember that.' And I said 'well, you're wrong.' [laughter] 'But we're just saying "other studies". We're still saying that that's a possibility.' Well it was this sort of nonsense we went through and in the end, of course, they stopped that programme.

They play all games, of course. The public were my protector. All my programmes were really popular. And they knew they couldn't just take them off. And they didn't actually want to because one side of them was saying this is good for television, a part of the eclectic mix of British television and so on. So they got Max Hastings to make what they called a complimentary programme, as you know, which basically was a series of images of Mrs Thatcher stroking missiles in a very suggestive manner... [laughter] and him saying things over it - and no one watched it. In the same way they got Auberon Waugh to go around - he's dead now so we must be respectful about this - to go around speaking to miners. 'How long have you worked at the coal face?' That sort of thing. That was to balance what I was doing there. So they provided great copy for those television writers who had wit. And quite a few of them, I suppose, did at that stage. I don't know who does now but they certainly did then. And then I met David Glencross ... well he ended his career by publishing a large article in The Times with a picture of me in it saying somehow British television has lost its way and we don't have any distinguished programmes like John Pilger. I couldn't believe it when I read this. I'd gone through fifteen years of hell with this guy... Anyway.

Petley: One of the biggest stumbling blocks, I think, for you with the IBA, ITA, ITC, all these various forms they went through was this... what they call the impartiality regulations.

Petley: Yes.

Petley: In one of your books you've got an excellent chapter called 'A Code for Charlatans,' where you really do attack very strongly the ITC code on impartiality. And you were often accused of being partial. And as you've said other programmes had to be commissioned to balance you out even though, of course, you would have argued you were balancing the bias of the mainstream...

Petley: Even though they often wouldn't use the term balance, you see. It was very important.

Petley: I think it might be very interesting if you would just tell people a little bit how the impartiality regulations actually worked, in particular, how they worked against what you wanted to do.

Petley: Well, the whole premise of it was so flawed as to be absurd. It was biased. And you still see people who are out-and-out propagandists on the BBC, still saying that they are impartial and balanced and that somehow the moment they've entered the BBC they've risen to a nirvana of perfect balance between everything... right, wrong and they're in the middle. Truth has got nothing to do with it of course. It's just absolute nonsense. One of course strides in various situations to be impartial and to be all those things, if it's necessary, if it's necessary. But writing this into law was extremely difficult and that's why the Irish issue was very important. That you could only interview so many people if you had others in a programme at a certain time and so on and so forth. I have to say I've forgotten a lot of the complexity of it but they had to keep reinventing it.

When I started with World in Action - I was the first reporter on screen with World in Action - and this was my first film. I suppose because I didn't care, as I was working for The Mirror and I wasn't in awe of television, I did the job that I felt should be done. I didn't care too much about what they thought about it.

The regulations now, I think, have probably got it almost right in that there is the ITC, just before it gave way to Ofcom recently as the regulator. When there was a lot of hoo-ha about my Palestine programme the ITC came down and vindicated it and exonerated it, but they did say that within the regulations. The people within it, the views within it, were fair and balanced, which they were. Most of the programmes will have a conclusion, which they recognise, based on the assembly of facts, i.e. the truth. But within that, reaching that argument, there was a balance of views, which is, of course, what journalism ought to be. But we've gone through almost 20 years of getting to that point and anyway it was a learning curve.

Petley: Indeed. Now, to return to your new book, your edited book, Tell Me No Lies. It's a very interesting collection, I think, because it's both a celebration of journalism, it's a celebration of some wonderful pieces of journalism but it's also - particularly your introduction - is also a malediction on what journalism has now, unfortunately, all too often become. I think that it might be an obvious question, I think it's one worth asking: what do you think should be the function of journalism?

Pilger: Tell the truth.

Petley: Yes.

Pilger: Do you know, it's a j'accuse that book in many ways, because it is saying 'here are great journalists'. Starting with Martha Gellhorn's report from Dachau, the Nazi death camp; Wilfred Burchett, who refused to be embedded in the occupation of Japan and as a result found out about Hiroshima, went to Hiroshima; Seymour Hersh; Jessica Mitford, the American Funeral Industry and so on. All these people are serious journalists, basically telling the truth. Telling the truth about what they're doing. It's not the whole truth about everything, of course it isn't, it's just telling a truth and a series of truths. What they're not doing is giving us the embedded version. They're not giving us the official version. They're not giving us the press release version. They're not... I'll give you an example. You know I usually spend most of the morning being upset on Sunday morning [laughter].

Petley: Every morning.

Pilger [laughing]: Every morning. The Chomsky article was enough. How disgusting that was. I don't know whether any of you saw this alleged interview with Noam Chomsky in The Guardian, about which all our ideas really should be re-examined because this was a set-up, with answers which should have gone with different questions and all sorts of things.

Petley: The interviewer obsessed about a packet of biscuits on his desk as well.

Pilger: Yes, it was a disgrace. This is The Observer... of the same stable, this progressive, liberal newspaper that once stood against the invasion of Suez and so on, and of course has been warmongering since Iraq. It always interests me how... it says 'Reuters shatter Bush's hope of forging free trade coup.' It's how Bush's hopes are shattered, how Blair is humiliated. It's not actually what happened... what happened actually in Argentina was one of the most exciting developments. That the United States, for the first time - and I've just recently been to Latin America - has been rejected by all its own old client states. It can't get its free trade agreement up. That's out. It's finished. Bush has had to go home. It's a very, very important story because in Latin America this has been happening over a very long time, each time of course with the US crushing it.

Once again in Latin America there is a rising of people to try and change their lives. So this is reported... about the hopes of Bush who is beset by a host of domestic political troubles. He's put breaking down free barriers in the region as the top agenda. Anybody coming at this without prior knowledge wouldn't know what the hell was going on. Next to it is 'Major US attack on eve of Iraq talks. Thousands of American and Iraqi troops, backed by fighter jets, besiege an insurgent-held town near the Syrian border.' Insurgent held, the insurgents are Iraqis, this is an Iraqi town. Who says it's held by the insurgents? Every other town the Americans have attacked has not been an insurgent held town, it's been an Iraqi town, in which almost all the people killed in it have been ordinary Iraqis. 'They hope to seal off a route for foreign fighters to join the insurgency and dislodge al-Qaeda in Iraq...' What route? Who says it's the route? '... led by Jordanian mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.' Now Zarqawi almost certainly has been dead for two years. This demon who's been invented... there's something like five per cent - according to an establishment think tank in America - five per cent of attacks in Iraq are down to al-Qaeda and the people who've come over, who undoubtedly have, they weren't there before but they're there now... five per cent of the attacks. The rest are an Iraqi resistance. But most of the violence - this is my point in showing this - most of the violence in Iraq, horrific violence, is done by 'us.'

This paper played its part, as most of the media did in trying to discredit, unsuccessfully, a John Hopkins Medical School study which was published and peer- reviewed in The Lancet , which showed most... more than a hundred thousand people, almost all of them civilians, had been killed by Coalition forces. Now that was a conservative estimate in Iraq. That one fact, the death of civilians. Actually, Julian, it runs through all the reporting of wars. You can go back to the First World War and beyond, I suppose, but the killing of ordinary people which started in earnest with the first war I reported in Vietnam. There was actually more reporting on the killing of civilians then than there is now. The object is to keep that out of the news, and that we have instead an attack on an insurgent-held town. It's such a distortion. It's not telling the truth. And it's shameful that this is presented as journalism.

Petley: It's unfortunate, I think, that one could pick up almost any newspaper at random and do that kind of analysis these days. But keeping on the subject of journalism, I wanted to ask you, the word 'tabloid' journalism has become very much a term of abuse these days but of course you worked on a tabloid newspaper, The Mirror. Is there such a thing as good tabloid journalism and if so, what constitutes good tabloid journalism?

Pilger: The Mirror I worked on was a good tabloid newspaper and I was very proud to work on it. In fact I believe in popular journalism.

Petley: World in Action was really...

Pilger: World in Action was tabloid. The word tabloid only became a pejorative term when Murdoch arrived. You never heard it before. It was just the format of a paper. When I went back to The Mirror for eighteen months after September 11 th 2001 -I was invited to go back and given pretty well a free rein for eighteen months - that demonstrated the sheer power of popular journalism and how it could inform people. Because in that eighteen months The Mirror became another great tabloid newspaper, sorry...

Petley: Compacts.

Pilger: Compacts. I like the way The Guardian becomes a thing called the Berliner . There's a wonderful interview with a German journalist who said, 'I've never heard of this Berliner . We've never had a paper in Germany this shape.' And The Guardian's been promoting itself as being the shape of The...

Petley: I thought the Berliner was a sausage or a doughnut or something.

Pilger: I thought it was somebody who lived in Berlin. But no it isn't, it's a newspaper with headlines you can't read and a rather effete composition and various things, that's apparently the Berliner.

Petley: So you would certainly argue that it is possible to have good, popular, approachable, understandable tabloid journalism?

Pilger: Yeah, look at popular journalism. The one thing that if anything gave journalists an idea of what newspapers can be and the power they have for good, if you like, was in the build-up to the Iraq war, when two newspapers broke ranks. The Independent and The Mirror. And they did it and stayed until the invasion was over and it all went wrong in many ways. But that period of the build-up... that I think had a huge effect on public opinion. I think it contributed to the numbers that turned out on 15 February 2003, in London. It was undoubtedly led by a tabloid newspaper being a newspaper.

I remember talking to the people on The Mirror during that time, it was almost as if they were sort of born again, they were so excited by what they were doing, they were so good at what they did, they had real journalistic skills and they were proud of what they were doing. And it wasn't worthy, it wasn't serious, it was powerful and it was truth-telling. And basically that's what popular journalism is. And that's one of the reasons why I've always wanted my programmes to go out on ITV. ITV has changed over the years but ITV is still a popular channel. And however isolated the programmes may be these days, it's still the popular channel.

Petley: What do you think it was about ITV that enabled you to make these programmes? What were the conditions that made these programmes possible and indeed, even today, still makes them possible? It's very fashionable to talk about dumbing-down or change for the worst etc. but nonetheless ITV does still manage to put out current affairs programmes. What do you think?

Pilger: A lot of current affairs then was actually run by journalists who believed in investigation, who believed in calling authority to account. There were quite a few BBC renegades - the group that asked me to go into television - all of them were BBC renegades. So they were trained technically, wonderfully, but they couldn't buy anymore the whole nonsense of whether they were going to be balanced in everything they did.

I think ITV welcomed people like that, for all the troubles I had with the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the friendly fights, I suppose, I had with various executives of ITV companies, I felt there was a backing for it, there was an understanding of it. And to lose that, as much of it is being lost, is a tragedy. I always felt to lose all those strands of ITV, not only World in Action, but First Tuesday, the Thames strands, the Central and so on. I worked for Central Television. We had a documentaries unit in Charlotte Street. And it was like a little shop and all of us crammed into it. Ken Loach, who is here tonight, was one of us. We practically sat on top of each other and borrowed chairs and so on. But without romanticising it, the idea that you could walk in there and if you felt passionately enough about something, you had a really good idea, but if you really believed not only that it was a good idea but that you really wanted to do it, then you'd be given some kind of development, some kind of help with it. I think that's largely lost now.

Petley: You've managed to have an admirable track record, even in recent years, of producing one-off documentaries. Has it become more difficult for you personally or hasn't it?

Pilger: No, personally I've had a lot of support from ITV in recent years. I think what is sad is that the other documentary makers that used to be on ITV are now not on ITV. There's no doubt that I can keep going on the basis of reputation, if you like, and also of audience. The audience happens. But my equivalent, if you like, or myself all those years ago, starting in television, I can't imagine it. What would they do? Because now there is such a - to use a horrible word - 'culture' of, well, doing something utterly gratuitous about navel gazing or some sort of personal affliction, some active exhibitionism, all of which is fine - let it be, let's have it. But we now have this endless belt of psychotherapy as television... depoliticised, muted, keeping out stuff that might be helping us make sense of the world.

Channel 4 are the worst at this. Channel 4 are devoted to it, it seems to me. And you can see it's even in the so- called serious subjects that they take on. But the clip of Stealing a Nation you saw, ITV repeated that. The reaction to that was qualitatively so extraordinary. People wanting to do something about it, wanting to see it again, protesting that it had gone out so late. This is what I've over the years tried to convince the people in television about, that from their point of view - and I understand that it has to be popular, I even understand that it has to give something to advertisers (though advertisers, interestingly, are never the problem, they're very happy to support documentaries for all their own reasons) - but the idea of ratings is such a self-defeating concept. For example, Death of a Nation , which I think showed earlier on, when that was shown it went out at 10.35 mid-week, it was 74 minutes long so it finished up against midnight. The moment it finished British Telecom recorded 5,000 calls a minute to Central Television, which went on into the early morning.

Now the programme itself...I say 'only' rated about two-and-a-half million, but the reaction to it was extraordinary. I suppose once you understand that, you understand the impact that documentary journalism has in this country. I think largely it's lost in the United States. I think it was lost a long time ago. It's lost in other countries, but in this country it can always be re-fired, reactivated again. People will react to something and it's very frustrating to see so much drivel appear on television when even the ratings are drivel, don't justify it. But whereas the reaction to powerful factual programming more than justifies it. I don't know whether I make that argument... it's an old refrain of mine, I'm afraid.

Petley: I think it's really depressing when the excuse for there being so much drivel on is that's what people want. That's the really patronising thing.

Pilger: Yeah, Murdoch used to say that.

Petley: Yes, of course.

Pilger: And McDonald's

Petley: A couple of quick questions then I'm going to throw this open to the floor because I'm sure lots of people have got questions they want to ask. But most of your most recent films, with the exception of the one about Breaking the Mirror - The Murdoch Effect [d. David Munro, 1997], have actually been about foreign countries whereas an awful lot of your early work was actually about the UK, often done in tandem with great pieces in The Mirror. I was wondering, would you like to do a UK-based documentary again and if so what would you like to do it on?

Pilger: Yes, I have thought about this. I suppose because they try and take on great themes that affect people's lives at whatever level, whether they're in the UK or whatever. I very much want, in a lot of these films, to connect the lives of people - the lives of people watching with the lives of those in the film. I suppose what I would do is a film that would show how the best premises of life in this country have been systematically undermined, and especially in the last seven years. The health service, education and how, swept completely out of our vision, is the fact that 28 per cent of the children in this country live in poverty. Those are the unseens and it's been in the back of my mind for some time. And perhaps later on, when I've finished the current project that I'm doing I may do that. But it needs to be done on a pretty big stage... that this is what has happened in this country. We now open the newspaper every day and you see it happening to state education and the lies that are told about state education need to be examined and exposed in a film of that nature.

Petley: I was actually looking at the subjects of some of your earlier TV programmes and I picked out prison, the conspiracy laws, child poverty, the health service, immigration - all topics which are so key today. Now, I want to end up with just a couple of quotes from your introduction to your book. One is from David Bowman in his book The Captive Press and David Bowman says that what we are facing now is the second great battle of the freedom of the press. And then you quote the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignatio Ramonez, who talks about creating, 'a new Fifth Estate that will let us pit a civic force against this new coalition of rulers', by which he means, of course, media rulers. And I wondered if you'd, to end this part of it, before we turn to questions and points from the audience, how you think that battle might be waged, how we might form this coalition because I think you... I'm sure you'd agree it certainly is necessary.

Pilger: Yes. Well I think we wage the battle by beginning to come up with ideas like his, which are unusual. It's almost as if the media is still off limits. It used to be... we talk about it now, we worry about it, it angers a lot of people, it frustrates people. Years ago it used to be like brain surgery, you know - 'I don't quite know what that's about so we'll go ahead and do it anyway' - but not anymore. What he's doing there is proposing that the journalism becomes a public issue. And I think it ought to be. It's so important. For example, I think the Guardian's so-called interview with Noam Chomsky, a man who has contributed so much to the well-being of human beings for a very long time, the quite deliberate demolition of his reputation, should be a public issue - and not be left to some specious 'let's ask the Guardian ombudsman' system that produces a an apology few people will read. Television journalism should be a public issue, too. Murdoch was an issue long ago when he sacked 5,000 people in order to move his operation to Wapping. But his pernicious effect on journalism and democracy, and freedom, should be held under a spotlight every day. Moreover, individual journalists have to begin taking responsibility for the part they play in the promotion of rampant great power .

Petley: Oh yes, they're extraordinarily unselfcritical.

Pilger: Unselfcritical, defensive... 'you can't mean to say we're not objective...'

Petley: With some exceptions, yes.

Pilger: Of course, there are honourable exceptions. But all of us in the media have to begin a grown-up debate the role we play in terrible events - such as rapacious invasions of defenceless countries. Listen to BBC people waffling about their God-given impartiality and refusing to acknowledge their importance to the schemes of the state and you realise the debate has yet to begin. Yes, we need a Fifth Estate: the public watching over journalism.

T here are a lot people in media institutions, I feel, who would like to debate it. Certainly I do believe - and this is something you might want to say something about Julian - but part of the problem is the way journalism is taught. I've got a very ambivalent view about media colleges. It depends where you go, of course, but I have been to some important media colleges where all they are doing is supplying fodder for the Murdoch press. At Harlow they have a course that is sponsored by The News of the World.

Petley: And they're proud of it.

Pilger: And they're proud of it. Someone told me the other day, asked me to go there. And I said 'get rid of that and I'll come.' Okay there is a dilemma about getting people jobs, I understand that. As a seventeen-year-old who decided not to go to university, I was very frightened about not getting a job, not getting a start in journalism. I understand that. But we're talking about graduates now, about people who should be asked to share the responsibility of what they're about to do. And those who teach them should not just be - I'm sorry - former hacks who tell them how it works in there in a technical sense, give them the old line about objectivity and then say 'away you go' without offering them a constructive critique of the media and warning them. Teaching them how to navigate through it.

Petley: Very important. Well, as somebody who's just in the process of setting up an MA in journalism, of course I take what you say to heart and I shall certainly invite you along as a guest lecturer. Now then, thank you very much. Let me throw this... there's an awful lot of people here as you can all see, but do please if you would, keep your questions short because I'd like to try and get as many people asking questions as possible and we have half an hour. Now there is a roving mic, so if you raise your hand if you want to ask a question, I will get the mic directly to you. Okay, I have a question down here at the front, here.

Audience member: Thank you and I'm interested in the comment - I think at the end of the Cambodia film - about the pre-fascist... and fascism in America today. And I'd like you to say something about the encroachment of fascism.

Pilger: Sorry, at the end of the Cambodia film, I didn't say... did I say fascism?

Audience member: Your State Department person.

Petley: It was the other film.

Audience member: One of the films.

Pilger: Ah.

Audience member: And also about... with relevance to the conservative religious right in America.

Petley: It's in Breaking the Silence, John, I think, that's where the comment comes. Not from you but from... yeah.

Pilger: Yes... sorry I wasn't being pedantic about it, I couldn't remember saying that in Cambodia . Well, we have my question to Ray McGovern, the CIA man - and this is a man at the heart of the American establishment, American power - when I asked him about fascism and I quoted to him Norman Mailer's remark that we've entered a pre- fascist era and he said 'well, I wish it was a pre-fascist era.' It really was a very fine answer and he surprised me with the answer. I think one has to be careful about using the term 'fascist' because the associations are so powerful with the Nazis and with Mussolini. But Mussolini - that's where fascism began, of course - defined it rather well as when state power and corporatism come together. Now that has certainly happened.

Petley: Berlusconi.

Pilger: Berlusconi. I think in the United States, which hasn't been a democracy for a very long time, it's been a plutocracy , I think there has been effectively a kind of military coup d'état . I think there has been, Bush is following on the policies that have gone before, so any nostalgia for the pre-Bush period I think is misplaced. But I think what has happened in the last few years there is that military power, the Pentagon, has taken over in the form of the so-called neocons. This is undoubtedly a cabal and I would think they are a fascist cabal. That doesn't mean to say that the United States is fascist. It isn't. But the way its policies and its will have been imposed on the rest of the world, probably since the beginning, since its invention, had all the earmarks of fascism.

When you see, as I have, the bloody end of American power - and I've seen it many times - let's say in central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, then there's nothing to distinguish the fascists who do the job on the spot, whether they belong to an El Salvadorian army, and their backers, funders and trainers: the Americans. So that is the difference between one and the other. And it's something that again, we were talking about debate and how we need to reclaim terms really. Even that term is a good one to talk about. Many people are going to have different views. We need to reclaim 'democracy,' the term. We need to reclaim the term 'reform,' which has been so debauched. We need to reclaim all our vocabulary of debate, political debate, and get it back. And then we can talk constructively about what is happening in the world which is very, very dangerous.

Petley: A question right at the back there in the middle of the row. And while the microphone's coming to you, just to add something to what John's said, we shouldn't forget that one of the first great media empires in the world was in the Third Reich. It was the Alfred Hugenberg empire. So I see the microphone is making its gradual way...

Audience question: I wanted to ask you what you feel the ultimate agenda is of states like America, or indeed America. Obviously you talk about it as a pre-fascist or at least characteristics of fascism in the way that they behave with other nations, but would you say that it's just oil in terms of what they're seeking to get out of their activity around the world because if it is pre-fascist and surely it should be more than that. And if it's not then what is it?

Pilger: I think it's domination. And it's a sort of destructive domination, even from their own point of view. Because indebtedness is so dangerous to the American economy and here they are spending something like five billion dollars a week on this absolutely self-defeating adventure in Iraq. I think what has happened is domination. It is controlling the world's resources, it is controlling the world's strategic points. There are now 400 odd American bases around the world and at every gateway to all the sources of fossil fuels, they are well guarded by the United States, there is serious purpose to this. It's not simply a mess in Iraq, but since 11 September 2001 there has been this spread of American power - tentacular power - all over the world. It is domination, and we don't have to go back too far historically... domination is all. And when you add to that... the domination succeeded in the past with what they used to call multilateralism , which is really America running things but getting others to go along with them. That's what, I think, with all respect to him, the likes of Ray McGovern misses. And that's why the establishment in the United States and in this country is split. That has gone. The easy way of doing it has gone. They didn't upset the people.

These people who are what they call ideological - well, they're all ideological, Clinton's just as ideological - but these people have a zeal, they're zealots. So they will go ahead in their programme of domination, often in quite a self-destructive way. But basically, the aim is domination. It is control. It is control of resources. The control mechanisms were established at Bretton Woods at the end of the Second World War with the setting up of the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, these are all controlled basically from Washington. It was a very good system. And when Keynes, who was the British representative at the Bretton Woods meeting, objected, said that what this will do will plunge the poor world into permanent debt, and that we should think of another way, the Americans wanted him out and he was withdrawn - Attlee brought him home. But of course what that was about was setting up a control mechanism, which has worked fine. And it's still working sort of fine. But the Bush regime have added another dimension. As the project of a new American century document says, we are the cavalry on the new American frontier. They do see themselves that way. They may fall off their horses doing it that way, that's the problem.

Petley: When I first read that document I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a spoof. I really have to say I did.

Pilger: No, it wasn't.

Petley: Yes, question there, gentleman, yes, you, with the hand raised, can you take the mic to him please? Two are coming to you, you've got two at once now.

Audience member: Hi John. Are you treated as National hero in places like Cambodia and other parts of the world? And also what do you think America should have done after 9/11?

Pilger: I don't think I'm treated as a National hero anywhere. I don't think they know who the hell I am now, I became well known to the Khmer rouge in Cambodia and they didn't regard me as a hero. [laughter] But what should be done now... what did you... sorry, the second bit... what should be done about...

Petley: What should America have done after 9/11?

Pilger: After that? Well, it should have investigated and, with the co-operation of the world community, a world community that's actually felt... you may cast your mind back, people were shocked by what happened. It was a spectacular horror. And I think there was a lot of good will towards the United States and towards those 3,000 people who died in that atrocity, to the United States, seeking justice. But from day one... the end, there wasn't going to be any seeking of justice. It was used, as we all know, as an excuse to further an agenda that was already in place. And I think what other countries would have co-operated, the use of good intelligence. The West has one of the biggest, most complicated intelligence apparatus, thanks to the Cold War. What the hell have they been doing since the end of the cold war? I think it's a reasonable question to ask. We now learn that these 7 July bombers were actually under surveillance by intelligence in this country. And somehow, someone didn't tell the police or something or other, I don't know what it was. But that's the story that Sir Ian Blair has yet to announce.

I think good intelligence work, good police work. But then, to stop attacking other countries. The people who did 9/11 were the result of an American backing for the Mujahadin going back to when President Carter signed a secret order in 1975 actually helping to set up the Mujahadin , which became al-Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden was at one point working for both MI6 and the CIA. And it all came home to roost in a terrible way on 11 September. So to say to them 'please stop doing that'. But yes, I think the idea of bombing countries... bombing Afghanistan was absurd. It just killed a lot of people. And invading Iraq of course has created a terrorism network, which I personally don't believe existed before that. I think there were cells here and there undoubtedly. But it has now recruited all over the Muslim world people who wouldn't otherwise have dreamed of being terrorists.

Petley: A question here... if you keep your hand up the mic will come to you... just keep your hand up, then they'll know where you are. Probably accurate to call it a 'network of networks' now, isn't it John, the terrorism network of networks?

Pilger: Yes, yes but you see Julian the question that has to be... again the old information being power... we haven't begun to even talk about state terrorism. Here you have Charles Clark with this ill-fated and absurd list of proposals about combating terrorism. There was no reference to state terrorism. And the implication of that is very clear: that state terrorism can go ahead with impunity and without being accounted for. There is no law against it. Well, most of the terrorism - and if we are to use this very strange amorphous term - but most of the terrorism in the world is state terrorism. There's a privatised kind of terrorism. It's miniscule. It's run by fanatics like Osama Bin Laden and others. But the idea that we think only about terrorism in terms of these small groups I think denies us a real understanding of it.

Petley: This, of course, is the point that Chomsky makes and has made repeatedly... Question here.

Audience member: You mention the desirability of self-criticism on the part of journalists and I wonder if, looking back over your long and illustrious career, there are any occasions when you feel you're responsible for an act of distortion or misrepresentation or oversimplification which you now regret.

Pilger: No, I'm not here to regret, sorry. Too late! Sure, I did all those things, made lots of mistakes, but I can't ask your forgiveness tonight.

Petley: Lady in the purple top.

Audience member: I wonder, when you mention getting information from newspapers or... what is the importance of blogs nowadays? I'd like to search this route and I'd like to be aware of what the world consists of. So I turned to blogs... to the internet and I found out much more than is in the newspapers nowadays. As well, when you mention the interview with Chomsky I just thought yes, I've seen somewhere but not in The Guardian, I don't buy newspapers anymore. And then it wasn't on some kind of blogs that I go.

Petley: That's exactly where I saw it as well because I've stopped reading The Guardian for obvious reasons. Oh, sorry.

Pilger: Yes, well it comes through the door, I like the friendly sound of something... it's a tradition ritual... flopping on the thing... you know... then you can look at it, it goes in the green box... I agree with you. I'm suffering something of withdrawal at the moment because not only has my phone died but my broadband has died with it.

Petley: They're after you, John.

Pilger: Eh?

Petley: They're after you.

Pilger: Well, clearly. BT. If only it was a conspiracy but unfortunately it isn't.

Petley: Inefficiency.

Pilger: BT. But, first thing I do in the morning, there are five or six sites, and I bill my newspaper. I download. I like reading hard copy, I don't like reading off the screen and I'm pleased I like reading it off the page and I suppose I download six or seven immediately. Six or seven major pieces. None of them available in the press here. None of them are in The Guardian. I look at The Guardian. Usually I look at Steve Bell in The Guardian. Particularly the comic strip and the penguins. It gets the day off. But then the stuff in between I don't worry about. It comes off the net. The net... I'm a convert. I did show symptoms of being a Luddite earlier on and rejecting it but I've now embraced it utterly, to the point where as I don't know how I would have found out things, how I would have had a newspaper. There are now so many good sites... they say there's a lot of rubbish on the net. There is. But as you well know, using it, if you keep to those sites that very skilfully trawl right across the media you can have the best newspapers you'll ever buy. It's so important now. I don't suppose I go for blogs that much. Some blogs are okay but there's also a lot of drivel, some of them go on and on. But I'm speaking about real journalism...

Petley: Information Clearing House [informationclearinghouse.info].

Pilger: Information Clearing House is an amazing site. It's run by one man! Tom Feeley in America. How he does it! God! It is extraordinary. And he trawls everywhere. From Al Jazeera right across to the US, it's just an amazing effort on his part. It's so important these days. You know in the last elections in South Korea... what's the site called? OmniNews isn't it?

Audience member: OhmyNews [english.ohmynews.com]

Pilger: OhmyNews , thank you. OhmyNews has a huge following in Korea and they backed the candidate who won, and he won largely because he was backed by OhmyNews . It's so important. People have given up on newspapers, they regard that free exchange as something terribly important. So it's very, very powerful.

Petley: I think web-based news certainly is an important component of Ignatio Ramonez's Fifth Estate. A couple more questions, we've just got time for? One down here, right in the front.

Audience member: I do my reading on the internet - the news - and I have a pretty good idea of what's true and what isn't, but you mentioned about established power in the States and here, and I guess I just want to get an idea of how organised you think the different establishments are. Because I think what I struggle with is just the idea of the conspiracy theory of everything, because I think that's inhibiting my desire to think that people like us can change the world. Do you know?

Pilger: Well, 'conspiracy theory' is a pejorative term. It's usually used if you've said something that's very revealing, or written something that's revealing and probably tells the truth. Then it will be called a conspiracy theory, because everything in the world happens due to mistake and cock-up. That is the Guardian view of the world. It's a nonsense of course. It doesn't. There are conspiracies but we have to be careful of them. We have to judge each one and we have to investigate it and to see if it is real or not. There are some very wild and unbelievable conspiracies floating about. There are many to do with 11 September. I think we have to be careful that we don't accept the really unbelievable conspiracies for the very believable ones.

It's quite clear that the invasion of Iraq was a conspiracy. Blair conspired with Bush, unknown to the public in this country and to much of his own establishment - intelligence establishment - to attack Iraq. He did that back in 2002 and he did it with the Spanish Prime Minister as well. It was a conspiracy. And that's what we're dealing with here. So I think you just drop the 'theory' and just call it a 'conspiracy.' But beware of ones that really don't have evidence. We always need evidence. We need facts. They're terribly important. And I think people are empowered, they do have power when they find out about things, they have information. I think what then becomes frustrating, having got the information, they're not quite sure what to do with it. But this is a fairly recent development.

I've never known a time in my career, I suppose, as a journalist when people have been more aware, where there's been more of a consciousness. So that's produced a whole set of, I suppose, worries among people... 'what do we do with it?' But the first stage is almost being reached, that they are informing themselves. Just a little patience is needed perhaps. I'm not sure what the next stage is, incidentally, but I think people are gaining power in spite of the media, the mainstream media, and in spite of living in the single ideology state as this sort of non-democracy where a fifth of the population vote for the Prime Minister and they call it a landslide.

Petley: I'm going to have to wind this up, I'm afraid, because time has ticked by to 8.15. We've been fairly unkind about quite a lot of journalism this evening and not least the poor Guardian. But I think that's because, you know, both of us from our different perspectives - John as a practising journalist - believe very, very strongly in the power of journalism and how extraordinarily important journalism is, and we believe that it should be a great deal better than it is. And all I can say is that if all journalism was of the quality of yours, John, we wouldn't have the complaints and gripes that we do, but as always it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you all very much for your questions and points. I'm sorry we couldn't go on longer. Thank you.

Pilger: Thank you Julian. Thank you.

[applause]