Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World [Paperback]

John Pilger (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2005

Prison scandals, terrorism, corporate fraud, election rigging—most likely you have heard something of the sort in the last ten minutes. But what is truth and what is part of the great "washout" of biased reporting? A celebration of lucid investigative reporting, selected by titan of the craft John Pilger, could come at no better moment. Pilger's book travels through contemporary history, from war correspondent Martha Gelhorn's wrenching 1945 account of the liberation of Dachau to Edward R. Murrow's groundbreaking excavation of McCarthyism to recent coverage of the war in Iraq. This homage to brave, often unsettling coverage features a range of great writing, from Seymour Hersh's Vietnam-era muckraking to Eric Schlosser's exposé of the fast-food industry to preeminent theorist Edward Said's writing on Islam and terrorism. Unrepentant in its mission to expose the truth behind the messages that politicians, warmongers, and corporate-run media inculcate, Tell Me No Lies is essential for anyone who wants to understand the world around them objectively and intelligently. It's not just a collection of high-quality reporting, but a call-to-arms to all who believe in honesty and justice for humanity.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

At a time of growing skepticism about the press throughout the world, Pilger, an award-winning British journalist, offers a powerful reminder of its proud history of revealing truths. This collection of investigative journalism of the past 60 years includes pieces by well-regarded reporters such as Seymour Hersh, Edward R. Murrow, Jessica Mitford, and Eric Schlosser. He begins the collection with Martha Gellhorn's 1945 dispatch from Dachau, chronicling the release of prisoners and their horrific accounts, and ends in 2002 with Edward W. Said's coverage of Islam and terrorism. Pilger prefaces each piece with a biographical sketch and some context for the reportage on McCarthyism, the My Lai massacre, the thalidomide scandal, the war in Chechnya, the dubious 2000 U.S. presidential election, and the war on Iraq, among other topics. Pilger's collection is well timed and will appeal to readers concerned about media consolidation and the ability of the press to discern and tell the truth. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"'Genuine objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by 'reliable sources' but by the unfolding of history. It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.' T. D. Allman, Journalist" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st Printing, September 2005 edition (August 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560257865
• ISBN-13: 978-1560257868
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Integrity in Journalism, January 26, 2006

By 

I. Martinez "need free press" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World (Paperback)

While everyone is talking about integrity in our government, someone needs to look at the so-called "watch dogs" of government and how they became the fourth arm of government. Yes, the press. Tell Me No Lies, talks about a few rare journalists who told their stories and sometimes sacrificed a great deal as a result. The stories they tell are not pretty and shouldn't be read unless you are willing to believe them. Most of them have been told over and over, but people tend to forget them. They need to be read again so people are reminded.

We already know the federal government is trying to take all the power from the legislative branch of the government and the legislative branch appears to be willing to hand it over to the executive branch irregardless of the long-range consequences. And in turn our Judicial Branch appears to be willing to politicize itself to the point it wants to allow the Executive Branch to have more power than it was ever intended to have. In other words, we are walking into a dictatorship.

This book is a warning of what a democracy really is. It's a fragile balance between the three branches of government with a FREE PRESS that is not afraid to criticize, confront or tell the people of this country what in fact, the country is doing in the name of freedom when it kills people overseas in order to maintain its influence and keep "communism" out of areas when the threat was less real except in the minds of the politicians back here. Even the military that have to fight the wars speak up because they are there and are training thugs to do the dirty work to uphold dictators.

This book tells it all. The relationship between Reagan and Thatcher, for instance, when Iran/Contra got hot and Reagan asked Thatcher to take over in Cambodia and the British soldiers did the bulk of the training of Pol Pot types while the United States was busy in Iran/Contra and then trying to get out of trouble for getting caught.

It makes the reader really question whether or not this country really believes in democracy the way it really proclaims it does. Without a free press, there is no democracy. The press is as important to a democracy as is the right to vote or to assemble or to lobby our congresspeople or Senators, etc. Do not hand it over to corporations like we do everything else as in health care.

It needs to be read by everyone, particularly in this country. But also in the United Kingdom, our "cousins" who share in our foreign policy dirty work.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Work of Historic Value with Deep Meaning for the Future, September 6, 2009

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World (Paperback)

This is the middle book in the John Pilger set that I bought. The others that I am including in a review trilogy include:
2002 The New Rulers of the World
2007 Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire

Although the book is daunting at first site, at 626 pages, it is MUCH easier to read than Laurrie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, for the simple reason that it is a collection of twenty-nine stories by different investigative journalists and can be read in pieces.

Use "Inside the Book" provided by Amazon to see the range of the stories. This is mostly about government terrorism against its own people, or in a few instances (e.g. thalidomide, fast food) government complicity in corporate atrocities against the paying public.

Eight of the pieces center on Iraq from 2002 onwards.

I put the book down thinking along these lines:

1) This is a treasure chest for any class at any level including high school. Students can be challenged to read one of the 29 pieces, then go and do research to find the "official" story, and then be lead through a critical thinking process that includes fact-finding, analytic tradecraft, and ethics.

2) Something like this is needed for the corporate world of white collar crime. Although there are some tremendous books out there, such as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man or Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses, and The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the public has been dumbed down and a great deal of public intelligence activism is needed.

3) Finally, something like this is also needed for the intersection between transnational criminal gangs and governments. Moises Naim lays out the $2 trillion a year global crime economy in Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy; others have done partial studies on government corruption--what I find utterly fascinating is that government bribes are said to total $1 trillion a year, which is precisely half the estimated total of the transnational crime network.

The take-away for me, apart from once again confirming the value of individual integrity in the face of institutional pathology (see Pathology Of Power, is to also confirm what Robert Young Pelton taught me and 7,500 other mid-career officers, which is that government reporting from a standard Embassy is second to third hand at best, and there is NO SUBSTITUTE for "eyes on" ground-truth.

I pray for the day when every individual on the planet has a cell phone with a camara and we are able to create the World Brain and EarthGame such that fraud, waste, and abuse are instantly exposed at every level across every function. There is no lack of wealth on this planet--what we lack is integrity in our organizations, and public intelligence in our public. To that I turn my attention for my final twenty years.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A taste for the truth, however ugly, rather than entertainment, November 12, 2009

By 

Brian Griffith (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World (Paperback)

Pilger compiles 600 pages of the best investigative journalism since 1945, including his own riveting reports from Cambodia in the wake of the Khmer Rouge. It's a feast of great writing. But the selection is heavy on horror -- Hiroshima, My Lai, apartheid South Africa, Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq. Or else it deals with awkward realities, like "The American Way of Death" or "Fast Food Nation." This is not the more usual feel-good, patriotic, ego-boosting sort of journalism. Pilger honors journalists who uncover things most of us would rather not know, and that many power holders wish to keep secret. As we know, contributor Anna Politkovskaya was only one of many journalists recently eliminated for exposing such things.