THE TROUBLE WITH PILGER
The media: Priul Johnson
examines the latest exposure of pilgerism
JOURNALISTIC awards do more harm than good. In the first place there are far too many of them and the selection often has the unmistakable whiff of Buggins's Turn. Then again these are the kind of accolades the Left is extremely adept at manipulating, taking over the selection committees, infiltrating the secretarial staff. Key prizes often go not to good journalists but to political propagandists. The outstanding example was Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times during the worst years of Stalin's paranoid dictatorship and mass- murder. Duranty was a passionate apolog- ist for the dictator. His favourite express- ion was: 'I put my money on Stalin.' He was well-informed and knew the extent of Stalin's atrocities. Indeed we have documentary evidence that he privately put the numbers of Stalin's famine victims at between seven and ten million. Yet not a word of this guilty knowledge appeared in his reports to his paper, which continued to paint the regime in glowing colours. Mal- colm Muggeridge, who reported from Moscow for the Guardian during the Thir- ties and knew Duranty, described him as `the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism'. Yet Duran- ty was given the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 — at the height of the famine — for 'dispassion- ate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia'. His dispatches were 'marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity'; they were 'excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence'.
I was reminded of Duranty by the bestowal on John Pilger of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Richard Dimbleby Award, the citation claiming he is a 'man who in the best sense bears witness'. The award was particularly inappropriate as Richard Dimbleby him- self was an objective reporter of the highest calibre who never allowed his own views to influence his dispatches and com- mentaries in the smallest degree. What particularly annoyed members of the Dimbleby family is that Pilger is the exact opposite — not for nothing has he given the word `pilgerism' to the language — whose reports are opinionated and tenden- tious and who is not so much a journalist as a propagandist. Needless to say he is a favourite of the kind of left-leaning people who find their way onto awards commit- tees and has twice been made Journalist of the Year. But equally he is held in the • greatest possible suspicion by many senior people in the media. The 'facts' stated in his documentaries and articles have been repeatedly challenged by experts in the field, not necessarily from any political motives but simply out of a regard for truth. Pilger's reporting on South-East Asia has been particularly suspect, and the diplomat Derek Tonkin, at various times British ambassador to Vietnam, Thailand and Laos, has gone to a lot of trouble, and in the face of much abuse from Pilger and his backers, to nail some of his many misstatements. Pilger is expert at emitting clouds of obfuscating ink when his asser- tions are challenged, but the number of times he has been caught out explains why the Bafta people found it so difficult to find anyone of distinction to present him with his award.
One of the items which impressed the `They're celebrating getting their freehold rights.' Dimbleby committee, it seems, was Pil- ger's Central TV documentary 'Cambodia: the Betrayal', shown last October, which portrayed two men, Christopher Macken- zie Geidt and Anthony de Norman, help- ing to train the Khmer Rouge in their murderous activities. As Geidt put it, the programme 'accused us not only of murder but of volunteering for the service of the worst mass murder since Hitler'. There was no truth whatever in this assertion and earlier this month Central TV, having at one point offered the two men £50,000 each in an out-of-court settlement, was obliged to pay them a great deal more in a High Court apology which cost it an estimated £500,000 in damages and costs. Why the people who run Central TV should wish to engage in this kind of reckless character assassination, and why the Bafta bigwigs should wish to reward it is something I leave to their consciences, if they have any.
What has subsequently emerged, as a result of a careful investigation by the Evening Standard, is that Pilger had never met the men before he made the program- me, or tried to do so, and that he never put to them the appalling accusations he was preparing to make, or gave them any opportunity to tell him why his conspiracy theory was baseless. He relied for his `facts', such as they were, chiefly on claims by a Labour MP, Anne Clwyd (who had to apologise in a separate action). She had met the men briefly in South-East Asia, where they were engaged in quite different and entirely respectable activities. She, too, made no attempt to verify her suspi- cions by challenging the two men directly. What strikes one about the whole business is the sheer lack of the most elementary professional standards in the way Pilger set about presenting this dreadful smear, one of the most serious libels I can remember.
Pilger is now putting out his usual clouds of ink and obviously expects to get away with it. But the matter surely cannot be left as it stands. Ought not Central TV direc- tors and shareholders, half a million down, be demanding how it happened that such a mendacious programme was authorised and made? Should not heads roll? And should not the Independent Television Commission, and the Standards Authority, be urgently demanding from Central why such falsehoods were transmitted? Ought not this to be a factor in considering whether Central is a fit company to have a licence under the new Act? Not least should not Bafta now withdraw the award which was made to Pilger? Alternatively, they could change its name to the Walter Duranty Award. It may be that the broad- casting authorities ought to go further. Thanks to his left-wing friends within the industry, Pilger seems to have remarkably easy access to our television screens. In view of his conduct, now exposed for all to see, has not the time come for this access to be withdrawn?
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