MEDIA PERSONALITY
John Pilger
Since Winning the EMMA Award
John Pilger is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. In 2003, after his EMMA recognition, he was the first journalist to be awarded the Sophie Prize for exposing deception and improving human rights. That same year, he wrote and directed the documentary “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror”, which unravelled the background to 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. In 2009, John was awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. He was also a high-profile supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and described him as a “truth teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale”.
John sadly died of pulmonary fibrosis on 30th December 2023, aged 84. Throughout his career, he brought a unique blend of tenacity, courage and controlled anger to the investigation of the ‘official’ version of events from around the world, and his exposures, through words and images, of man’s inhumanity to man have jolted the consciousness of the public. He remains a figurehead for ‘old school’ investigative journalism and political dissent – clear-headed, unshakeable in his moral convictions and impervious to manipulation or deception.
Background (Before 2003)
John Pilger was born in Bondi, New South Wales, to a father who had worked in the coal mines and a mother who was a schoolteacher. John began his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun. He later moved to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, where he was a reporter, sportswriter and sub-editor. John also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper’s sister title. After moving to Europe, he became a freelance correspondent in Italy for a year before settling in London in 1962. John joined the British United Press and Reuters on its Middle East desk. In 1963, the English Daily Mirror recruited him as a sub-editor, and he advanced to become a reporter, a feature writer, and the chief foreign correspondent.
John went on to win Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award in 1967 and 1979 and wrote a regular column for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014. Whilst living and working in the United States for the English Daily Mirror, he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign on 5th June 1968. John’s career as a documentary film maker began in 1970 with The Quiet Mutiny, and he went on to make over 50 documentaries. John’s other works include 1979’s Year Zero, which describes the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and 1993’s Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy. Pigler has also published books such as 1975’s The Last Day, 1981’s Aftermath: The Struggle of Cambodia and Vietnam (co-authored with Anthony Barnett), 1984’s The Outsiders (co-authored with Michael Coren), 2001’s Heroes, and 2002’s The New Rulers of the World.
