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Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs
By John Pilger (Editor)
ore timely. In selecting for this anthology articles, broadcasts and book extracts that have got behind the facade of official silence to reveal important and disturbing truths, John Pilger is paying his own professional tribute to some of the men and women he most admires. Here are the famous muckrakers (Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre), as well as the less well known (Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima in September 1945; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s). Here, too, are the mavericks (the great German undercover reporter Gunter Wallraff; Jessica Mitford on 'The American Way of Death'). The book ranges from across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past fifty years, from the scenes witnessed at the liberation of the death camp at Dachau in 1945, to the bloodshed caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Along the way it bears witness to epic injustices committed against the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and Palestine. John Pilger sets each piece of reporting in its context, often offering personal insights into the writer, and introduces the collection with a passionate essay arguing that the kind of journalism he celebrates here is being subverted by the very forces that ought to be its enemy. Taken as a whole, the book tells an extraordinary 'secret history' of the modern era, through the stories filed by some of its finest journalists. It is also a call to arms to journalists everywhere - before it is too late.
About the Author
John Pilger has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of Journalist of the Year. Among a number of other awards, he has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the UN Association Media Peace Prize. He lives in London.
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