The polemicist and journalist John Pilger who died on the 30^th December 2023 at the age of 84 was a constant presence in the media for most of my adult life. I came of age during the time the mainstream media celebrated Pilger for being a dogged investigative journalist who spoke truth to power. During my A level photography course in Sixth Form I heard from my left leaning tutors and read in text books and other material how Pilger should be celebrated for his journalistic work and should be placed alongside others such as the photographers Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange and Don McCullin as greats in their field.

When I departed from my teenage leftism phase and as I got older I watched Pilger and his work and saw how it increasingly became different to distinguish between Pilger’s writing and various left wing conspiracy theories about the United States. I mourned this change from what I believed was a decent journalist gone to the bad and in Pilger’s later years I didn’t bother reading or engaging with his stuff at all. But a recent obituary of John Pilger by Oliver Kamm in CapX magazine made me question my original belief that Pilger was a good journalist who had gone to the bad and become a one sided polemicist.

Mr Kamm in his negative obituary of Pilger, which incidentally is one of the best of its type I’ve ever seen, shows us that Pilger was always at least partially a polemicist and much less of an impartial investigative journalist than many of us believed.

Here’s a section of Mr Kamm’s magnificent takedown of John Pilger. Mr Kamm’s assessment of Pilger can be found via the links above and below.

Mr Kamm said:

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.

As I said earlier this is a magnificent destruction and take down of John Pilger’s reputation as a journalist. He was not someone who looked dispassionately for answers in the course of his journalism, instead he seems to have been someone who, as Mr Kamm said, looked for the answers that fitted with his anti-Western and anti-American ideology.

Everyone who writes or creates has biases. We can do our best to keep these biases in check or try to give both sides of a story or to point out when stories are nuanced rather than black and white, but Pilger did none of this. If a story fitted Pilger’s worldview, even if it meant defending awful authoritarians, he was on it. If Mr Kamm is correct then Pilger’s post mortem reputation will most certainly not match the plaudits that Pilger received in his early life. Pilger was not the voice of radical conscience, he was the mouthpiece of dictators and that is what is probably going to be how future generations see Pilger.