In 1979, Pilger and two colleagues with whom he collaborated for many years, documentary filmmaker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper, entered Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime.

This funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving drugs such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear.

[39]Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards.

[40] Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Reader's Digest and François Ponchaud.

The Times of 6 July 1991 reported: Two men who claimed that a television documentary accused them of being SAS members who trained Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, accepted "very substantial" libel damages in the High Court yesterday.

Desmond Browne, QC, for Mr Pilger and Central Television, said his clients had not intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood.

This story was subsequently cast into doubt by an investigation in the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) which uncovered that the girl and her mother had been paid to play their respective parts by a fixer working for Pilger.

I am suing The Spectator and its writer, Auberon Waugh, for one reason and one reason only: that in the June 12 issue Waugh gave approval and credibility to a totally untrue and bogus tale from Bangkok  that I, together with the author of a United Nations report on child slavery in Thailand, a photographer and a Thai human rights official, somehow “set up”  the buying of a child..."[45]Pilger went on in his letter to point out that he wasn't in Thailand on the month it was alleged to have occurred.

Pilger wrote in 2000 that the 1998 legislation that removed the common-law rights of Indigenous peoples: is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

[52] When Death of a Nation was screened in Australia in June 1994, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans declared that Pilger "had a track record of distorted sensationalism mixed with sanctimony.

He said the responses of his interviewees "put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, a claim that insults all those Jewish people who reject the likes of Ariel Sharon acting in their name".

Pilger strongly criticised Tony Blair for failing to respond in a substantive way to the 2000 High Court ruling that the expulsion of the Chagossian people to Mauritius was illegal.

In "an unremitting assault on American foreign policy since 1945", according to Andrew Billen in The Times, the film explores the role of US interventions, overt and covert, in toppling a series of governments in the region, and placing "a succession of favourably disposed bullies in control of its Latino backyard".

Attendees reportedly included members of Pinochet's security services, along with men from Haiti, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil who have been implicated in human rights abuses.

It looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America, led by figures calling for loosening ties with the United States and attempting a more equitable redistribution of the continent's natural wealth.

The documentary contends that the media far from acting as the fourth estate – instead uncritically reports the official line and spin from governments and in turn delivers propaganda over journalism.

In Pilger’s final remarks in the film, what remains clear is that more than ever, uncompromised, brave journalism is needed in our world, always challenging the official story, in his words, “however patriotic it appears, or however seductive or insidious it is.”[70] When interviewed about the film on Al Jazeera's The Listening Post he was asked that the media could in fact prevent war, Pilger replied that in his own view that the media could in fact stop a war from occurring.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs".

[97] Writing for the New Matilda in 2020: "Today, Australia is a vassal state bar none: its politics, intelligence agencies, military and much of its media are integrated into Washington’s “sphere of dominance” and war plans.

[98] In 2003 and 2004, Pilger criticised United States President George W. Bush, saying that he had used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq as part of a strategy to increase US control of the world's oil supplies.

[102]Pilger described Australian Prime Minister John Howard as "the mouse that roars for America, whipping his country into war fever and paranoia about terrorism within".

He thought Howard's willingness to "join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... evok[ed] a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf".

Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news".

[106] Pilger criticised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign of 2008, saying that he was "a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan"[107] and his theme "was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully".

[115] With the absence of a Russian "invasion" a bitter disappointment to its most avid promoters in London, this expose of Operation Orbital, the British army's secretive role in Ukraine, is recommended.

He hinted that the UK government may have been involved in the attack, saying it had motive and that the nearby Porton Down laboratory has a "long and sinister record with nerve gas and chemical weapons".

[126] Since being invited to open the University of Lincoln's journalism school in 2004,[127] Pilger told the packed room at its launch that "Too often courses are like factories churning out conformist journalists for the industry.

His documentaries were engaging, challenging and always very watchable" and "...He eschewed comfortable consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years"[152][153] A number of journalists had also paid tribute to Pilger upon his passing.

From the BBC's World Affairs Editor, John Simpson,[154] Channel 4', Jon Snow[155] and Private Eye's Solomon Hughes[156] and the Daily Mirror's, Ros Wynne-Jones[157] The academic journal, Ethical Space provided a number of tributes to Pilger.

"[194] As such he was met with criticism from the right-wing journalist Auberon Waugh (whose own ethics with regard to journalism was noted by the Guardian in his obituary: "Once he discovered the delights of the "freebie", he gave breathless accounts of his trips to the Orient, and the wonderful "Thai two-girl massage".