ACROSS almost six decades of investigative journalism, John Pilger unsparingly torchlit many of what George W. Bush described as “the darkest corners of the world”, relentlessly exposing the realities edited out of the mainstream Western media’s distorted narrative.

The concept of speaking truth to power may have been sullied by overuse, but Pilger stands out among those who seriously made the effort — and, in the process, made a discernible difference.

It’s hard to know where to begin in evaluating his multifarious — and multimedia — contributions to reportage. I first encountered him, indirectly, in the 1980s when ITV in Britain re-broadcast some of his groundbreaking 1970s documentaries. It’s hard to be sure, but most probably the first one I viewed was The Quiet Mutiny, an account of small but consequential revolts among American troops in Vietnam that invariably went unreported in the US.

This was followed by further reports on Vietnam and Cambodia, in the latter case notably a soul-shattering report on the aftermath of the depredations decreed by the Khmer Rouge, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia. As an eyewitness to the consequences of genocide, he was inevitably appalled when the US and China conspired in a cover-up only because they........

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