John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a four year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. "It was one of the strictest language courses I know," he says. "Devised by a celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and free of cliches, that didn't retreat into the passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still pictures".



Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance 'agency' in Italy (with the grand title of 'Interep') and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain's biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.



He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain's highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America's poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.



His work in South East Asia produced an iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot's reign. The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50 million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994 documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then occupied by Indonesia.



In Britain, his four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide, and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a special settlement.



His numerous documentaries on Australia, notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream (1988), Welcome to Australia (1999) and Utopia (2013) all celebrated and revealed much of his own country's 'forgotten past', especially its indigenous past and present.



He has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society's Best Documentary.



His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy). He writes a regular column for the New Statesman, London. In 2001, he curated a major exhibition at the London Barbican, Reporting the World: John Pilger's Eyewitness Photographers, a tribute to the great black-and-white photographers he has worked alongside. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigous Sophie Prize for '30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.' In 2009, he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

Evan Greer is a trans/genderqueer activist singer/songwriter, parent, and organizer based in Boston. She writes and performs high-energy acoustic songs that inspire hope, build community, and incite resistance! Evan tours internationally as a musician and speaker, and facilitates interactive workshops to support movements for justice and liberation. Wielding an arsenal of fiercely radical songs that vary in style from pop-punk poetry to foot-stompin’ bluegrass singalongs, Evan has been honored to collaborate, tour, and share stages with artists as musically diverse as Pete Seeger, Talib Kweli, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Immortal Technique, Hari Kondabolu, Billy Bragg, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Pamela Means, Anti-Flag, Downtown Boys, Against Me!, The Coup, Anne Feeney, Oi Polloi, Dispatch, Dirty Projectors, Holly Near, and Chumbawamba. She's currently the campaign director for Fight for the Future, the viral digital rights nonprofit. Evan writes regularly for The Guardian and Huffington Post, has been a guest on All Things Considered, and has been interviewed about her activism by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Democracy Now!, The Atlantic, CNN, Mother Jones, and even Fox News.

Evan is Campaign Director of Fight For the Future...

Fight for the Future is a non-profit organization founded in 2011 whose mission is to ensure that the web continues to hold freedom of expression and creativity at its core. We seek to expand the internet's transformative power for good, to preserve and enhance its capacity to enrich and empower. We envision a world where everyone can access the internet affordably, free of interference or censorship and with full privacy.

Our goal—always—is to build tech-enhanced campaigns that resonate with millions of people, enabling them to consolidate their power and win historic changes thought to be impossible. In 2012 we organized the largest online protest in history, an internet-wide strike against web censorship which defeated the SOPA and PIPA bills. More recently, our Battle for the Net campaign drove nearly four million people to contact the FCC resulting in the game-changing passage of net neutrality rules (a “First Amendment” for the Internet). Here’s exactly how we did it. Our Reset the Net campaign organized around protecting the privacy of hundreds of million of internet users.

Our accomplishments are testament to the notion that with the right approach and creative activism, the public interest can prevail—even over some of the most entrenched political forces in the world. For more details on these and other accomplishments, check out a timeline of the events leading up to and immediately after the SOPA strike.

Evan has been also been at the forefront of supporting the humane treatment and release of Chelsea Manning who had her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama.

Why I Fought for Chelsea Manning

by Evan Greer