Normalizing The Unthinkable

Before the afternoon panel began, I met up with John Pilger at his hotel. He’d just flown in from London and was only in New York for the panel before flying to Caracas, Venezuela the next day. A journalist for over 30 years, Pilger has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Palestine, and Iraq—to name a few of the countries to which his investigative reporting and filmmaking had taken him. Pilger told me that he’d never been as concerned about the state of the media as he was today. “I think there’s a lot of reasons to be very concerned about the information or the lack of information that we get. There’s never been such an interest, more than an interest, almost an obsession, in controlling what journalists have to say.” Despite the fact that the war in Iraq is reported daily in most U.S. newspapers and networks around the world, Pilger didn’t think the world’s press accurately conveyed the reality of life for Iraqi civilians. “We get the illusion that we are seeing what might be happening in Iraq. But what we’re getting is a massive censorship by omission; so much is being left out,” he said. “We have a situation in Iraq where well over 100,000 civilians have been killed and we have virtually no pictures. The control of that by the Pentagon has been quite brilliant. And as a result we have no idea of the extent of civilians suffering in that country.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13492.htm

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