Hidden Agendas By John Pilger. London: Vintage, 1998, 687 pp.

Abstract

Those who admire the work of John Pilger, journalist and film maker, will find much to enthuse over in Hidden Agendas, his seventh book. At nearly 700 pages it is lengthy and its list of subjects includes Vietnam, East Timor, apartheid, English tabloid newspapers, Wapping, Rupert Murdoch, Burma, Hillsborough, Australian aboriginals, Kenya, Tony Blair and New Labour, the Gulf War, and Northern Ireland. Pilger's primary themes, however, are con­siderably fewer: media control, globalization, the military, capitalism, and, cru­cially, opposition to this ideology. Pilger writes in the introduction: "This book is devoted to slow news" (p. 1). By "slow news" Pilger means those stories which have not received serious media coverage. He goes on to note: "When slow news is included, it is more than likely dressed in a political and social vocabulary that ensures the truth is lost" (p. 2). That Pilger knows what the truth is, is a central premise of his book. In his bitter criticism of global media coverage of the Gulf War, he writes: "The war was not a war at all. It was a one-sided blood-letting. Kate Adie [BBC reporter], like most of her colleagues, had reported the news, but not the story" (pp. 52-53). Pilger's real concern throughout this book is the story, not the news. This is an unequivocally political book appealing to the educated general reader. A substantial number of notes are employed and there is a useful index, but Hidden Agendas has no scholarly pretensions. Indeed, overall, Pilger can be cavalier, even irresponsibly so, with regard to referenc­ing. For example, in the following assertion made in the introduction, at least seven claims are made, not one of which is substantiated: ...