The documentary maker used to be “one of the greatest journalists in all of history,” Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi has mentioned
Investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died on Saturday at his house in London elderly 84, his community mentioned on Sunday in a submit on X (previously Twitter).
Pilger used to be identified for his hard-hitting exposés at the human price of empire, from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, to Western democracies’ systematic repression of their very own running categories. His documentaries come with ‘Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia’, ‘Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror’, ‘The War on Democracy’, ‘Palestine is Still the Issue’, and ‘The Coming War with China’.
“Every journalist, even though they may not know it, owes a debt to John Pilger,” Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi informed RT on Sunday, calling the award-winning filmmaker “one of the greatest journalists in all of history.”
Pilger “realized journalism was about illuminating things for the ordinary person, not for elites, it’s not for awards,” Rattansi defined, praising his overdue pal and workman for his “moral compass in which he looked at everything from the bottom up, from the average person.”
“He was a vocal critic of fake journalism that is so on display when we look at Gaza, when we look at Ukraine, and of course that’s why he found RT as an outlet he could speak to, because he was banned de facto by all British media,” he mentioned.
Learn extra
Afghan invasion used to be by no means a ‘good war,’ it used to be all the time an imperialist undertaking, John Pilger tells RT
Pilger used to be lengthy a fixture at mainstream information shops, running for the Day-to-day Reflect, Reuters, and ITV’s International in Motion. Then again, he used to be steadily frozen out via the established order over the terminating decade, with The Mum or dad the terminating to finish familiar newsletter of his column in 2015, in what the journalist described as a “purge of those who were saying what The Guardian no longer says anymore.”
Former colleagues nonetheless flocked to social media to pay their recognizes. Pilger used to be “a great Daily Mirror journalist back in the day, one of the very best. Brave, insightful, challenging authority, and instinctively own the side of the underdog,” that outlet’s workman writer, Kevin Maguire, wrote on X.
ITV managing director Kevin Lygo known as Pilger “a giant of campaigning journalism” who “eschewed comfortable consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years.”
Rattansi highlighted Pilger’s tireless campaigning to distant WikiLeaks writer Julian Assange, incarcerated at Britain’s Belmarsh Jail since police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019, as a well-known piece of his legacy, crediting the journalist with “Assange’s survival and him not being killed in the CIA plot” via the company’s then-director Mike Pompeo.
Pilger is survived via his spouse and his two youngsters Sam and Zoe, who’re additionally writers.
