Outside of certain circles, he's seen as more of an advocate than a capable journalist who bothered to get his facts straight.Curry Pervert wrote:Pilger generally on point and ahead of the curve.Lu Zwei wrote: Fri Jan 23, 2026 8:57 am And now replace Russia with China and you have another one for the next 50 to 100 years.
Some good, groundbreaking reporting, mostly about Cambodia in the '70s, Australian indigenous issues, and Palestine. No doubt.
But he took major heat for completely making up a story about "buying" a pre-pubescent Thai "slave girl" (his words), which turned out to be untrue; she was, in fact, not a "peasant," nor an orphan, nor even from Northern Thailand, as he'd reported. She was a local schoolgirl who thought she was posing for photos and getting a train ticket for free from a nice Western journalist. He either got duped by a local fixer and didn't do his homework at all, or fabricated the story completely, thinking nobody would notice. And he got caught. For a time, university media courses actually used Pilger as an example of how not to report on foreign affairs.
Yep, I'm remembering that correctly, from a journalistic ethics course, after 20 years:
He was also an apologist for the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo. And later in life, spouted Sergei Lavrov's press releases on RT, unquestioningly. Tended to get caught w/his pants down quite often by his few fact checkers (re: his Balkans report by the editor of The Guardian during the '90s, if I remember it right). Then again, his main employer/bread and butter was the Daily Mirror, one of Britain's least accurate tabloids.Pilger's obit in the Boston Globe wrote: A story about a young Thai girl forced into slavery until Mr. Pilger rescued her turned out not to be true.
Kind of the Oliver Stone of lefty journalism?
