Academic Pays Tribute to John Pilger, Acclaimed Journalist and Recipient of Honorary Doctorate from University of Lincoln

John Pilger, one of the most acclaimed journalists of his generation who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lincoln, UK, in 2008, died on 30 December 2023, aged 84.

Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University, now retired, said: “John always took a keen interest in the University. He helped at the launch of the School of Journalism in 2004; his annual talks for the ‘Journalists Speak Out’ series up to 2013 would always be packed out. He donated £200 for a prize to the best student in the Investigative Journalism BA while his archive, currently held at the British Library, was digitalised by Florian Zollmann, a PhD student here at Lincoln.”

When Zollmann, the late John Tulloch, former Professor of Journalism at Lincoln, and Keeble edited a collection of essays on the theme of peace journalism to accompany the launch of the human rights reporting Master’s degree in 2010, Pilger wrote the Foreword.

He was one of only two journalists to win the Journalist of the Year award twice. The other one was his fellow Australian, Phillip Knightley, who was also appointed a Visiting Professor at Lincoln.

Over a career beginning in 1958 as a copy boy on the Sydney Sun, Pilger was a feature writer, columnist (for the Daily Mirror, New Statesman and Guardian), investigative journalist, broadcast documentary-maker, war correspondent, campaigning reporter and blogger at johnpilger.com. His eleven books, including Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (2004) and Freedom Next Time (2006), are crucial texts for journalism teaching in higher education.

In recent years, he devoted a great deal of his time to speaking out in support of his friend and fellow Australian Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, who is currently in Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the US on charges related to the publication of thousands of classified documents in 2010 and 2011.

Pilger was a fierce critic equally of US/UK imperialism and the corporate media which he considered served too often as propaganda for the military, political, economic and intelligence elite. He urged journalists “to be sceptical of those who seek to control us, indeed of all authority that isn’t accountable, and not to accept ‘official truths’, which are often lies. Journalism is or ought to be the agent of people, not power: the view from the ground”.