Opinion | John Pilger and the consolidation of the Western narrative
By Tom Fowdy
It was announced over the weekend that veteran journalist and broadcaster John Pilger had passed away at the age of 84 years old. Pilger, who had been shunned by the mainstream media in his latter years, was a fierce critic of Western foreign policy and offered some of the best journalistic and critical exposes in that angle, even to the point the BBC was obliged to publish his obituary. Of course, as I wrote on my X (Twitter) account at the time, I questioned did they of course publish or platform any of his work in recent years? The answer is no, of course they didn't, and one might want to question why.
It was observed that in the past decade, Pilger descended from being a journalist having some mainstream credence, to one who was pushed back into the fringe. The reason this happened is that geopolitical changes have taken place since 2013 which have substantially narrowed the acceptable space for the criticism of Western foreign policy, and to that end narrative control has been more duly enforced by Western governments over their respective media outlets. Pilger's views ultimately became no longer welcome as the stakes were raised.
The years 2012-2013 were a critical moment in the history of geopolitics, that's because it was the height of the Edward Snowden leaks which exposed the hypocrisy, crimes, as well as mass spying systems of the US and its allies, which received unprecedented media attention. Since that happened, Western governments began a crackdown on such dissent, namely by asserting the role of the national security state over newspapers that spearheaded this critical coverage, such as The Guardian, as well as the prosecution of Julian Assange, and of course weaponizing the fear of foreign interference immensely in order to stoke paranoia and close down debate.
Since that time, western foreign policy has also reorientated itself to geopolitical competition for hegemony against rival states, including Russia and China, and in doing so has re-asserted monopoly over discourse on these topics whereby dissenting views are simply not welcome, and through the above weaponization of "foreign interference" has created a culture whereby those who criticize the prevailing foreign orthodoxy are deemed as complicit with the enemy or compromised in some way, while of course this is an age-old tactic as seen by McCarthyism, it got considerably worse even to the point anyone who is deemed critical of mainstream liberalism, even without foreign policy, is dismissed as a Putin influence operation.
The successive events of the past few years have only consolidated this, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which heralded a massive reassertion of state power in the information sphere the world over, and then of course the Russian invasion of Ukraine which even I must admit set back criticism of western foreign policy more than any other contemporary event. Thus, it is little surprise that while John Pilger's work was once celebrated on matters such as the Vietnam War and Cambodia, when he sought to challenge Western foreign policies in new matters such as Syria, China, Russia, there were no plaudits for his critical exposes of whatever Western hypocrisy and deceit were manifest in the depictions of these events, rather Pilger was dismissed as simply as apologizing on behalf of the enemy.
Thus, in the last decade of his life, Pilger found himself no longer welcome in mainstream publications such as the Daily Mirror, The New Statesman, or the Australian Press accordingly to name but a few. People of course write online that Pilger "changed", but he did not, he was always critical of Western foreign policy and the Western media's coverage of it. Rather, what changed was the world, as the growing insecurity of Western governments amidst the transformation caused by the explosion in social media, combined with an increasingly uncertain context amidst geopolitical competition, ushered in new means of narrative control which would see criticism pushed underground.
We now after all, live in a world where the BBC incessantly provides one-sided coverage and outright misinformation about Ukraine every single day, amongst numerous other issues, without even the pretense of impartiality, and that is a demonstration of how journalism has ultimately deteriorated. There may never be another John Pilger for a while, that's because as of current the new generation of such writers (i.e people like myself) are simply not welcome to advance our careers in the way the generation who lived through the 1960s could, and thus with him an era of integrity in journalism is sadly passing away.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
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