John Pilger: Australian journalist dies

Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger has died at the age of 84, his family has announced.

A statement by his relatives on the X website said he died in London on Saturday.

They described Pilger as “simply the most wonderful and beloved father, grandfather and partner.”

He has been an outspoken and sometimes controversial critic of Western foreign policy. He has also been outspoken about the treatment of indigenous Australians.

Pilger was born in Bondi, New South Wales in 1939, but has been based in the UK since the 1960s. He has worked for media outlets including Reuters and the Daily Mirror.

He is best known for his work as a foreign correspondent, including reporting on the Vietnam War, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and from the United States during the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s.

He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy was assassinated while running to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, according to his website.

He has made several documentaries, including the 1979 film Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, about the country under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, as well as several films about Australia and its treatment of indigenous Australians.

He said: “Journalism has no value if it is not about humanity. Rather, it should be about people's lives.”

He won numerous awards throughout his career, including Britain's Journalist of the Year in 1967 and 1979, and the BAFTA Richard Dimbleby Award for Factual Reporting in 1991.

In recent years, he has been a prominent supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – who is currently in Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the United States on charges related to the publication of thousands of secret documents in 2010 and 2011.

He described Assange as “a truth-teller who committed no crime but exposed the government's crimes and lies on a massive scale.”

The official WikiLeaksX account described Pilger as a “fierce speaker of truth to power.”

Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan described Pilger as “a brilliant journalist and a fierce sidekick to the powerful in the right account”.

John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, said that although he had disagreed with Pilger over the years, “I admired the strength of his writing, even when I often disagreed with what he wrote, and he was always friendly when we met.” .

Former Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow described Pilger as a “great and consistent journalist”.

Kevin Lygo, of ITV, on which many of Pilger's documentaries have been broadcast, described him as a “giant of campaign journalism”.

Pilger also sparked controversy with his comments about Russia. In a 2014 article for The Guardian, he wrote that President Vladimir Putin was “the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in Europe in the 21st century.”

His friends confirmed Pilger's death to the BBC.