World Politics, Media - General & Miscellaneous, Media - Theory & Philosophy, World History - General & Miscellaneous

Hidden Agendas

Name: Hidden Agendas
Author: John Pilger
ISBN: 9781407086415

by John Pilger

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Overview

The model for this volume is the enormously successful Vintage Original DISTANT VOICES (93, 000 copies sold to date). It will gather together essays on a range of subjects including Burma, Fleet Street, East Timor, Vietnam today, the media and UK politics. 'Pilger is the closest we have to the great correspondents of the 1930s. . . The Truth in his hands is a weapon, to be picked up and brandished and used in the struggle against evil and injustice' GUARDIAN

Synopsis

In this powerful book, journalist and film maker John Pilger strips away the layers of deception, dissembling language and omission that prevent us from understanding how the world really works.

From the invisible corners of Tony Blair's Britain to Burma, Vietnam, Australia, South Africa and the illusions of the 'media age', power, he argues, has its own agenda. Unchallenged, it operates to protect its interests with a cynical disregard for people - shaping, and often devastating, millions of lives.

By unravelling the hidden histories of contemporary events, Pilger allows us to read between the lines. He also celebrates the eloquent defiance and courage of those who resist oppression and give us hope for the future. Tenaciously researched and written with passion and wit, Hidden Agendas will change the way you see the world.

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Editorials

Steve Weinberg

Think of it as a reference book that brings only bad news, unless the determination of the beleaguered journalists can be counted as good news.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Charles Jaco

For those who believe in a liberal media conspiracy, John Pilger has a news flash: There' s a conspiracy all right, but it's conspiracy of profit-mad media moguls, lazy reporters and zombielike news consumers.
— USA Today

Kirkus Reviews

Award-winning British journalist Pilger, author of A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia (1992), looks again for the truth behind Orwellian officialdom in Great Britain, the US, South Africa, Indonesia, and, most notably, Burma. Pilger makes a clear and disturbing case that US management of the media in the Gulf War covered up one-quarter of a million deaths, most of them civilian. And the reader may well follow his claims, US protests to the contrary, that the subsequent embargo kept food out of the mouths of children and medicine from the sick. But to go light on his criticism of Saddam Hussein or to claim that Israel is nothing but a US client state that has committed more acts of terrorism that any other Middle East entity seems like old Soviet propaganda, rather than truth. Pilger is, in fact, fervently anticapitalist in the manner of an old-style Soviet apparatchik. Thus, one cannot entirely trust his critique of big media such as CNN and the various enterprises of Rupert Murdoch, though such criticism is gratifying and long overdue. Pilger strikes home the most convincingly when he takes on British arms merchants, and he does so by sticking to numbers and actual quotations from officials. He's at his most passionate in his two chapters on modern Burma, writing about a railroad and an oil pipeline being built with slave labor, even with child labor. One would hardly expect Pilger to say kind things about Burma's generals, and he documents the collusion of multinational companies in the exploitation of Burma, but even here one senses that a fine reporter has veered into pamphleteering. A brave and badly needed corrective that itself seems untrustworthy at times but manages topoint out the lies behind slick official policy and criticize the media that sell them, even so.