I’m grateful to the link from Wikileaks to John Pilger’s keynote speech at Chicago Socialism conference in 2007. This is full of the sort of wisdom that you encounter all too rarely.
His main topic is what he calls ‘professional journalism’ , by which he means those in the media who do no more than present governmental and institutional propaganda. Journalists, he argues, should be the “agents of truth and not the courtiers of power”.
He speaks with the authority of someone who understands the “bogus objectivity” that passes for a free press and is part of the process of “normalising the unthinkable”.
In Iraq, for example,the real atrocity of the war is for the most part unreported, or else presented in a way that makes America (and Britain) blameless.
Pilger says that “real truth is subversive” and the myth that the media speak for the public is the great lie.
Hope lies in the guerrilla journalism that can find an outlet via the internet .
“True democracy is always fought and struggled for”.
