WATCH: Pilger CN Award Presentation

CN Editor Joe Lauria presents the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award to Jane Hill, the partner of the late John Pilger, at the British Film Institute in London. 

JOE LAURIA: Towards the end of his life, John often said that the space was closing for reporters like him in the mainstream. In recent years he turned to alternative media such as Consortium News, which was started in 1995 by a reporter named Robert Parry, who was an AP investigative reporter. Most of the major Iran-Contra stories during the 1980s were broken by Bob. He began Consortium News after the AP started to suppress a lot of his articles.

He created a consortium of journalists whose articles were being suppressed by their corporate editors. So John fit right in there getting published in Consortium News and he grew close to Bob. In 2017, he was presented with the Martha Gellhorn Award right here in London. I think that Victoria Brittain was there actually that night. 

Now I worked for The Wall Street Journal. Many of my stories were suppressed. I also worked for The Sunday Times here in London, and I joined Consortium News in 2011. When Bob died in 2018, I became the editor. We were really thrilled, of course, that John continued to write for us and I was thrilled that I got to know him.

One of the things Bob did was to create this award, and it’s the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award, and it’s named after an American journalist named Gary Webb, who continued one of Bob’s stories, which was about planes, American planes going to Nicaragua with weapons to help the Contras.

And those planes were returning to the United States full of cocaine. Gary Webb followed that story to see what those drugs were doing when they went to inner cities in the United States. Well, the mainstream media conspired to silence him, to destroy him, and his career was over, and Gary Webb eventually committed suicide.

Past winners of this award are Oliver Stone and Julian Assange. And speaking of Assange, as was mentioned, how sad it is that John couldn’t get to see him walk free.

Not only are those spaces that John talked about closing in the mainstream media, and probably have closed, but they’re closing in the alternative media now as well. In recent weeks, there have been arrests, home raids, interrogations of journalists under this country’s Terrorism Act.

And even in the U.S., one of our columnists had his house raided by the F.B.I. for things they’ve written or said, in the United States and Britain, our countries. Consortium News itself has been attacked in the last two days and taken over by hackers, and we’re working to restore that. 

Unfortunately, I was planning to publish an article that I did — a long piece, a long investigation. I went up to West Yorkshire, to Keighley, to Baildon, to Shipley, and I looked into John’s film, Conversations With a Working Man, to see if I could find anyone alive from his family. Unfortunately, they’re all gone, but I did a long piece about that and I was planning to publish it this weekend. We’ve been hacked and I can’t do that.

So I am now going to present the award. Can you come up on stage, please?

Thank you. Okay. So I was very pleased to be able to tell John that he’d won this award just a couple of months before he died, and I’m now pleased to present it to Jane, his partner. To Sam, his son. And to Miriam. Matilda. Matilda. I knew I was gonna screw that up and let me just — sorry, Matilda.

I’m going to read the award:

Gary Webb, Freedom of the Press Award, 2023 winner John Richard Pilger, journalist, filmmaker, author, for a lifetime of exposing injustice, afflicting the powerful and defending press freedom in his films, books and articles. Presented by the Consortium for Independent Journalism, publishers of Consortium News.

JANE HILL: Thank you Joe.  John’s son Sam, his granddaughter Matilda and I are really proud to receive this from you. It’s a great honor, and it’s something we’ll absolutely cherish. News that he had won this prize came, as you know, not long before his death. And at a time of very great personal struggle. So it was a dark time.

And I can’t tell you how uplifting it was and how moved and proud he was to receive the news that he had won this prize. And it was both because it was in the name of Gary Webb, a journalist, a courageous journalist he really did admire, and also because it was coming from Consortium News. I think John said to me many a time that Consortium was one of the last outposts of independent journalism.

It was a place unafraid to publish information and viewpoints increasingly excluded from the mainstream. So thank you, Joe. And as John would say, all power to you.

CN Editor Joe Lauria addresses the audience at the British Film Institute before presenting the Gary Webb Award. (BFI)