Over the last few decades, 'investigative journalism' has come to mean a kind of reporting that reveals the truth behind the facade and exposes the underlying agendas of those in power. For the last 30 years nobody has been better known for revealing those 'hidden agendas' than John Pilger.
In this anthology - the first of its kind to be published in the UK - he has selected 35 articles and extracts from books that have broken the official silence and exposed injustice and misuse of power, ranging from 1945 to the present. Here are the famous 'muckrakers' (Seymour Hersh on My Lai, Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate), as well as the little known (Will Burchett as the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima in August 1945, the Israeli journalist Amira Hass living and reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s); here are the analysts of power (Noam Chomsky and Edward W. Said on the workings of the media) as well as the mavericks (I. F. Stone on McCarthy, Jessica Mitford on the 'American way of death').
With topics ranging from Vietnam and Cambodia to East Timor and Palestine, many of the pieces 'revisit' the locations of John Pilger's own reporting of the last 30 years. Each of the pieces is introduced by John Pilger, who has also written a long and comprehensive introduction. Ranging from the liberation of Dachau in 1945 to the Florida elections scandal of 2000, taken together they form a 'secret history' of the last fifty years, told through the stories that revealed the truth behind the period's most important political events.
