When I read the news of the passing away of John Pilger on December 30 last year, I remembered a wonderful evening that I spent with him some forty years ago in London. In the summer of 1981, I interviewed him on behalf of The New Internationalist, a journal that was brought out from Wallingford in Oxford in those days. I was entrusted by the editorial board of the journal to edit a special issue on how the Western press covered Third World problems. Was it objective or biased ?
John Pilger at that time was a journalist with Daily Mirror, which was the second largest daily in Britain with a circulation of 3.5 million. To my questions during the interview, he came out with a very frank and blunt response that revealed his steadfast commitment to the reporting of the plight of the oppressed of the Third World, his life-long opposition to the Establishment, as well as the dilemmas he faced in his professional career. Following are a few excerpts from that interview, which I think will strike a chord among today’s journalists who are fighting in defence of a free press against assaults by the government, as well as among the general readers – :
“ …I have always been committed to tabloid journalism and to a wider audience. I am cranky about elitism, and hate it….I think the whole idea of objectivity is something bogus…What is needed from Western journalists is a basic sympathy for the people of the Third World, understanding of their problems. But there is the danger of being over-sympathetic, of looking at the Third World in Western terms of charity – a quick injection of goodwill… At one time I felt that it was the way Western readers could respond to disasters. But I no longer do it.”
Why ? Because Pilger’s own Britain was facing disasters when I interviewed him that summer in 1981. He admitted: “At a time when two million are unemployed here – when racism is encouraged in this country – it is a lot to ask people to take interest in Third World issues.”
(Re: The New Internationalist. UK. No. 100. June 1981, entitled TODAY’S NEWS AND TOMORROW’S ALTERNATIVES. P. 16)
Yet, Pilger continued his struggle to make his countrymen aware of what was happening in West Asia, South Asia and other parts of the world. Till the end of his life, John Pilger remained committed to the values that he upheld in the course of that interview with me more than forty years ago. Several of his last posts on social media protested against the carnage against Palestinians carried out by Israel in Gaza.
With those words, let me bid farewell to a brave fellow traveller in our journey of journalism.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
