By Andrew Fisher

In an age before home internet, it was books, newspaper articles and documentaries that we relied on to understand the world.

For many of my generation, John Pilger was formative in shaping our politics. Books like Hidden Agendas, Distant Voices and Heroes opened our eyes to conflicts that were rarely reported on in the mainstream news, like those in East Timor and Biafra.

His documentaries, broadcast on ITV, like Palestine is Still the Issue (2002) spoke plainly about the abandonment of the rights of the Palestinian people. They were powerful and, like his writing, conveyed a moral argument and a righteous anger. He was also a much under-rated interviewer – skewering those in power with his well-informed, incisive questioning.

This was journalism for activists. Even if you weren’t before watching or reading, you wanted to get campaigning afterwards. His documentaries also won mainstream critical acclaim – including a BAFTA and an Emmy.

For the generation before me, Pilger was a war correspondent for the Daily Mirror – exposing the crimes of the West in Vietnam and Cambodia among others. He was twice named journalist of the year.

And in his native Australia, he championed the rights and exposed the state crimes committed against indigenous black Australians. His documentary The Secret Country (1985) remains one of his most powerful.

At his best, John Pilger told stories that weren’t being told, speaking truth to power, and being a voice for the voiceless. He was bold, courageous and independent, which made him powerful.

It wasn’t only foreign policy either – Pilger reported on industrial disputes, like the Liverpool dockers in the 1990s, and took up the campaign for justice of families affected by the Thalidomide drug in the 1970s.

He scrutinised the actual (non-)performance of the Mandela government in a way that much of the liberal press did not, and many allies of the anti-apartheid struggle did not want either. Pilger made us question ‘great leaders’ not only in the West, but in the Global South too.

In 2003, he was rehired by the Daily Mirror under editor Piers Morgan, and the paper became the only mainstream daily vehemently against the war in Iraq – Pilger was the poster-child for that anti-war campaign.

His detractors point to some issues that he called wrong, but they are far outweighed by what he exposed, what he was proved right on, and by the fact that he inspired people – and very few journalists can boast that.

In recent years, appearing on the Russian state-controlled TV seemed to contradict the fiercely independent campaigning journalist that Pilger peerlessly exemplified for decades.

But in his final years he was also a steadfast campaigner for the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He was right to be.

His influence can be seen in the tributes that were paid to him by a range of journalists:

The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire said: “John Pilger was a great Daily Mirror journalist back in the day, one of the very best. Brave, insightful, challenging authority and instinctively on the side of the underdog.”

Veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson said: “I was fond of him, and I think it was mutual, even though we disagreed on many things over the years. But 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.”

Ex-Channel 4 anchorman Jon Snow said simply: “John Pilger was a great and steadfast journalist.”

Mehdi Hasan said: “I had my personal differences with John Pilger, and disagreed a lot with him on Russia and other geopolitical issues in more recent years, but as a teenager, reading him on Palestine, Cambodia and East Timor, his campaigning journalism had a profound impact.”

The General Secretary of the National union of Journalists, Michelle Stanistreet, said: “John Pilger was a giant of journalism… he was a guiding star for generations of aspirant reporters. A longstanding NUJ member, he was also the most redoubtable supporter of progressive campaigns creating work that was the embodiment of journalism that managed to be simultaneously, fair, balanced, whilst unequivocally on the side of the underdog.”

There are a generation of journalists and activists who have been inspired by the work of John Pilger, myself included. I met him at the book launch of New Rulers of the World in 2003 – and his passion and anger had warmth and wit. It’s what made him so powerful. While he rests, we must continue the struggle.

Andrew Fisher was Director of Policy of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2019.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/marjorie/133322716. Creator: Marjorie Lipan. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.