Poor old Sam Cooke. Shot dead in 1964, he lives on in his most famous song, Change is Gonna Come; the anthem of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. It’s a song of hope, used to inspire those fighting to end segregation and discrimination.

So why did the Sydney Peace Foundation used it at the beginning and the end of last night’s speech by the winner of the Sydney Peace Prize, journalist John Pilger?

His speech was anything but hopeful, containing a long list of the crimes of the US, Israeli and Australian governments, indigenous leaders who “tell us what we want to hear,” the NT intervention, the media and Barack Obama and so on.

“We dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the risque thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.”

Pilger, 70, has always positioned himself as outside the mainstream media. But his age and location — he hasn’t lived in Australia since the early 1960s — mean that his criticisms of the local media are outdated.

“Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers, look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear; on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinions that are unacceptable.

“It’s actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Almost instinctively, journalists know not what to do,” he said.

What invisible boundaries — doesn’t he read blog sites? Or look at the independent media?

Pilger at his best is an excellent journalist with an international reputation for uncovering corruption and injustice. But does that mean we can let him get away with this statement (made about the NT intervention)?

“Billions of dollars have been spent — not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities.” What billions of dollars? What war of legal attrition? If I want information about the intervention, I’ll read David Marr and Nicolas Rothwell, two journalists who spend weeks in the Territory researching and writing stories which contain eye-witness accounts and facts.

Nowhere in the speech, or in any of the articles about Australia which appear on his website, does it say that he has been to the NT since the intervention and actually witnessed the events on which he is opining. Is that good enough?

Listening to the speech reminded me of Auberon Waugh’s coining of the verb “to Pilger”, which is to “present information sensationally in support of a particular conclusion.”

Last night Pilger concluded that we “need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope.

“The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies — socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor — and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.”

And the evidence for that is…? Actually, there’s no point in analysing a Pilger lecture; like Scientologists, the audience is there to have their belief systems reinforced and receive the word of the prophet.

Last night’s audience, a mixture of my Birkenstock-wearing Balmain neighbours and UTS media students, loved it of course, and gave him several standing ovations. But I wanted to hear something new, and I was irritated by the misuse of Sam Cooke’s song.

And the next time I go to a Pilger lecture, I’m not taking the Prius. While John was eating his supper at Guillaume, I was still in the car park, trying to find my car.