Mirror legend John Pilger awoke world to great injustices as tributes pour in
He was, to many, the greatest Mirror Man of all - a journalistic legend who fought against injustice, championed the underdog, exposed the horrors of war, and held power to account all his life.
John Pilger was just feet from Robert F Kennedy when he was assassinated, the first into Cambodia to reveal Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge genocide, and in the present day an unwavering supporter of Julian Assange. It was announced he died on Saturday, aged 84. In a statement, his family said: “His journalism and documentaries were celebrated around the world, but to his family he was simply the most amazing and loved Dad, Grandad and partner. Rest In Peace.”
After six decades of reporting, he was still a tireless campaigner until the end. He made a rallying cry in his last published piece, for everyone to speak up to authority, calling Assange "Spartacus" and going on: “The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.”
John Pilger was Chief Foreign Correspondent at Daily Mirror (ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
During his six decades of reporting, John became a legend at our publication (Daily Mirror)It was his belief in the power of honest journalism to expose uncomfortable truths that saw him have an unrivalled award-winning career as a feature writer, war correspondent and Chief Foreign Correspondent at the Daily Mirror, alongside work on investigative programme World In Action. He went on to write for newspapers around the world, penned books and made dozens of hard-hitting award-winning documentary films, exposing everything from the crisis in East Timor to 2019’s “Dirty War on The NHS ”.
Daily Mirror Editor Alison Phillips says: “John Pilger was most likely the greatest of all Mirror Men. He believed in journalism with purpose and its power to change the world. As a Mirror sub editor then reporter for almost quarter of a century spanning the early 60s to late 80s - and with more recent guest appearances in our pages over the past decade - he instinctively understood great storytelling.
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“He also believed in the journalist’s responsibility to use their trade for good. Pilger was instrumental in shaping the conscience and values of our title during [Hugh] Cudlipp’s Mirror of the ‘60s and we remain perpetually grateful to him for instilling those ideals which we still hold dear today.”
John Pilger interviewed Nelson Mandela (ITV/REX/Shutterstock)Pilger was notoriously critical of US, British and Australian foreign policy, having reported from in Vietnam and was adamantly anti the war in Iraq. He refused to compromise on his beliefs - whether they were popular or not. Lindsey German, of the Stop the War Coalition, who have organised pro-Palestine protests, said: “He was a fearless and honest journalist who was a major critic of western imperialism, and whose experience of covering successive wars gave him a real insight into who benefits from the horror of war. He was a great friend of the anti-war movement in Britain and lent his powerful voice to a number of campaigns.”
Stella Assange, who married Julian in 2022, called John the “consistent ally of the dispossessed”, after he spent years campaigning for the WikiLeaks founder’s release and even visited him in Belmarsh prison. “John awoke the world to the greatest injustices,” she said. “He fought for Julian’s freedom until the end. ‘We are all Spartacus if we want to be’, he wrote in his last published piece. This was John, challenging us until the end.”
On the showbiz end of the spectrum, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters added: “John Pilger. I miss you my friend, what a great man you were. We will carry you in our hearts forever, you will always be there to give us strength”. Meanwhile former Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who brought Pilger back during our post-9/11 years, added: “RIP John Pilger, a brilliant firebrand journalist and ferocious holder of the powerful to proper account.”
Despite being a mainstay of British journalism, Pilger was born in Bondi, Australia, in 1939. He recalled being “happy as a child”, but it was by no means a comfortable start in life. His parents were Claude and Elsie, his dad a miner since he was 15. They raised John and his brother Graham, seven years John’s senior, in a tiny tin-roofed home, as Bondi tried to scrape its way out of the Great Depression.
John Pilger exposed genocide in Cambodia during his career (ITV/REX/Shutterstock)Elsie, a French teacher, and Claude were both activists themselves and once asked what they stood for, famously replied, “we’re for the underdog”. John launched ‘The Messenger’, the first student newspaper at Sydney Boys School, before landed an internship at Australian Consolidated Press.
On his second day as a reporter - aged just 18 - he became the story himself, having been sent to cover a swarm of attacking bees, only to end up stung between the eyes and pictured as “a victim” on his rival’s front page. It was one of the “absurd” anecdotes from the career he loved.
Aged 23, in 1962, he left Australia and came to London. He joined the Mirror as a sub editor in the era of the great campaigning editor Hugh Cudlipp. He apparently got the job after boasting of his cricket skills and claiming he could help them to victory in an inter-newspaper tournament. It wasn’t long before he was reporting.
One of his first Mirror investigations came in May 1964 revealing how foxes are caught as cubs, farmed and sold to be hunted to death by fox hunts across the country. He was also interviewing the likes of Bobby Moore - already England captain but yet to win the World Cup: “Do you know,” he told Pilger, “I get 300 photographs of me to sign each week? I’ve got to lick every envelope, address it and post it. That’s two hours work, three nights a week.”
The whole world became his patch. He was in Hiroshima, Japan, exactly 22 years after the atomic bomb exploded there, looking at the shadow on bank steps of “a man sat eating his breakfast of rice, until he was burnt into the granite; name, body, soul and all.”
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Back in his native Australia in 1967, at Broken Hill, kangaroos and wallabies were being killed off by hunting: “Then a crunching noise is upon us. We are driving over thousands of bones.” Sent to the USA for the 1968 election year, he witnessed the assassination of Robert Kennedy, shot dead just like his older brother in Dallas five years earlier.
John's work in Cambodia was presented on Daily Mirror's front page in 1979 (Mirrorpix)Later Pilger wrote: “On 5 June 1968, just after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot in my presence at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just acknowledged his victory in the California primary. “On to Chicago and let’s win there!” were his last public words, referring to the Democratic Party’s convention that would nominate a presidential candidate. “He’s the next President Kennedy!” said the woman standing next to me. She then fell to the floor with a bullet wound to the head. (She lived.)”
In 1971, Pilger produced a world exclusive for the Mirror as the first Western reporter in Bangladesh to report on mass starvation and atrocities as the country fought for its independence from Pakistan under the front page headline Death of a Nation. In 1979 it was Pilger who revealed in the Mirror the genocide by Pol Pot’s Khymer Rouge regime inside Cambodia, after four years of almost no contact with people inside its borders.
He wrote: “An incredible human disaster has happened in Cambodia, a once peaceful and gentle land in South East Asia. Perhaps more than two million people - a third of the population - have been killed by a fanatical regime whose apparent aim was to wipe out anything connected with the modern world and to return a whole nation to “Year Zero”; the dawn of a new age of slavery, without families and sentiment, without machines, schools, books, medicine, music.”
He left the Mirror in 1986 after 20 years but was brought back in 2001 by then editor Piers Morgan and attacked the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. “The war against terrorism is a fraud,” wrote Pilger in his first piece back. “After three weeks’ bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.”
Pilger’s career was just as impressive outside the Mirror. He made documentaries for BBC and ITV, covering topics from Vietnam, to the indigenous people of Australia. His 1974 documentary Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot, revealed the battle for compensation for children after concerns were raised about birth defects when expectant mothers took the drug.
Tonight, Kevin Lygo, managing director of media and entertainment at ITV, said: “John was a giant of campaigning journalism. He eschewed comfortable consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years."
Pilger was married and divorced twice; first to journalist Scarth Flett, with whom he had a son, Sam, 50, and again to journalist Yvonne Roberts, mother of their daughter Zoe, 39, an author and art critic. All share John’s strong passion for activism. And his children especially would probably agree with another of Pilger's beliefs: that journalists had the power to be "heroes".
It was in an updated preface for one of his many books that he recently shared a wish for others to take up his mantle and continue his campaigning journalism. “The responsibility..is clear,” he wrote. “It is to expose the lies of those who control the narrative, warmongers especially, and never to collude with them. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured.”
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