Q&A


What made you become a journalist? I had a passion for newspapers. I delivered them at age 10, in a fruit box with wheels made from ball bearings. At 12, I started a newspaper, The Messenger, at Sydney High School. At 17, I was a ‘copy boy’. The day I was offered a four-year cadetship on the Sydney Telegraph was one of the happiest of my life.


What other job might you have done/have you done? I might have become a commercial artist. I used to sketch everything and everyone.


What advice would you give someone starting in journalism?


Remember you are, or you ought to be, an agent of people, not power. Remember that established authority uses the media to lie routinely and that much of ‘mainstream’ journalism colludes with this. Reject jargon and clichés. Of all the trophies to win, the most admirable is independence.


What advice would you give a new freelance? All of the above, plus learn to navigate a system that may seem monolithic, but can change with the breeze.


When did you join the NUJ and why? I joined the NUJ in the 1960s when I arrived in Fleet Street.


What’s been your best moment in your career? It’s that day, long ago, when I was told I was hired as a cadet journalist. ‘When do I start?’ I asked. ‘Now’, was the reply.


And the worst ones? Losing those with whom I travelled the world and covered wars and took risks and laughed: the great Daily Mirror photographer Eric Piper and the great documentary film director David Munro, my comrades.


What is the worst place you’ve ever worked in? Apartheid South Africa.


And the best? ‘Best’ hardly does justice to those places where I have witnessed ordinary people triumph against the odds and liberate their lives, as in East Timor, Vietnam, Nicaragua, South Africa, Bangladesh and Palestine: the latter momentarily, yet heroically. And in the mining communities of Durham and Yorkshire where men and women of limitless courage took on a vicious, undemocratic British state. ‘Best’ describes them.


Who is your biggest hero? The ordinary people I’ve written about and filmed all over the world. My first book, ‘Heroes’, is dedicated to them.


NUJ & Me


John Pilger is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and author


And villain? I prefer ‘criminal’. There are many wielding unaccountable power. Tony Blair comes immediately to mind – a man largely responsible for the destruction of a country and the deaths of a million people, now enriched by the dictators he ‘advises’.


Which six people (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party? Martha Gellhorn, Wilfred Burchett, Medea Benjamin, Richard Prior, Larry David and Hugo Chavez.


What was your earliest political thought? Plotting to subvert the wishes of my older brother. (I failed).


What are your hopes for journalism over the next five years? That journalists reject Murdochism in all its guises and support courageous whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon who have done our job for us.


theJournalist | 17


CHICO SANCHEZ/ALAMY


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