In the Name of Justice: the television reporting of John Pilger Anthony Hayward Bloomsbury, 413pp, £16.99 ISBN 0747552010

Thirty years ago, Anthony Hayward reveals, the producer of the radical documentary series World in Action told John Pilger that he could not say "the people" on ITV, because it was Marxist. This month, the leading ITV culture buff, Lord Bragg, proudly described that subversive show Coronation Street as "the people's art form".

In the Seventies, Pilger made a film with Peter Hain about the anti-apartheid activist's trial on conspiracy charges. Earlier this year, in his New Statesman column, Pilger suggested that the then Foreign Office minister Hain should be tried before an international court for his outspoken support of the punitive UN sanctions against Iraq.

Much has changed since Pilger made his first television documentary in 1967, about mutinous American troops in Vietnam. Yet Pilger himself seems to go on and on. Others, like Hain, who opposed the war in Vietnam, have become enthusiastic converts to new Labour's military interventions. Pilger, however, remains unmoved by what he describes here as the "market testing of new brand names" for imperialism, with "humanitarian war" only "the latest to satisfy the criterion of doing what you like when you like, as long as you are strong enough".

Pilger's unswerving belief that "journalism is about lifting rocks, and not accepting the official line" sets him apart from a newer generation of crusading western reporters. All too often they take the easy option of looking for evil in somebody else's backyard, demanding of the UK and US governments that "Something Must Be Done" in the Balkans or Africa. By contrast, a central aim of Pilger's campaigning journalism has been to expose the misdemeanours of our own societies, whether that means Britain, the United States or his native Australia.

Once upon a time, Pilger made path-breaking documentaries about the taboo issues of race and class in Britain. In his 1971 film, Conversations with a Working Man, for example (the cause of the row about Marxist terminology cited above), the subject of the film did not fail his driving test, or boss hotel cleaners about, or chase drunken Russians around an airport. He talked about his life, hopes and fears as a dye-house worker in Keithley, Yorkshire. Popstars it wasn't.

Even as his television documentaries have focused more on events in the developing world, Pilger has primarily had the faults of western society in his camera sights. His best films have sought to expose the double standards and great power politics behind international interventions, and the consequences for those on the receiving end.

Year Zero - the Silent Death of Cambodia, made in 1979, not only documented the horrors of what happened under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, it showed how President Richard Nixon and his sidekick Henry Kissinger gave birth to that barbarism by secretly and illegally dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas that "bombed Cambodia, a neutral country, back to the Stone Age, and I mean Stone Age in its literal sense". Pilger revealed how, by continuing to recognise the overthrown Pol Pot and refusing food aid to the new Vietnamese-backed government, the UN Security Council was ensuring that the Cambodian people starved.

More than twenty years later, Pilger's film Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq exposed the horrific consequences of UN sanctions, and surprised many with the news that, under new Labour, the RAF was still bombing the no-fly zones over Iraq at a cost of £4.5m a month. "I was conscious of the risk of being labelled Saddam's dupe," says Pilger, "although James Cameron once told me that 'when they call you a dupe, you know you've got it right'."

It is ironic that In the Name of Justice does not really do justice to Pilger himself. Hayward, who has previously written biographies of Julie Christie and Michael Crawford, has produced a rather one-paced, near-hagiographic catalogue of Pilger's documentaries. The result not only makes Pilger's television career seem considerably duller than the programmes themselves, it also fails to engage effectively with well-known criticisms of his work.

It would have spiced things up a bit, for example, to see a response in kind to Auberon Waugh, who claimed to have coined the verb "to pilger", which he defined as meaning "to treat a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail, to ham it up, always in the left-wing cause and always with great indignation".

Hayward quotes Pilger's warning that campaigning journalists need to hold "a very modest, cautious view" of what it is possible for them to achieve. He could perhaps have written a more interesting book if he had borne those words in mind, and treated its subject a little less like his personal hero.

Mick Hume is the editor of spiked-online.com

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