WikiLeaks is possibly the most exciting development in journalism in my lifetime... The truth about the Vietnam War was told when Daniel Ellsberg lea… - John Pilger

Pilger: You waste my time because you have not prepared for this interview, as any journalist does, and I've done many interviews. The one thing is to prepare for them and this interview, frankly, is a disgrace.
Hill: What preparation would you have cared for, Mr Pilger?
Pilger: To read. Read. It takes time.
Hill: It's a pity you wasted a lot of your time tonight, Mr Pilger. I was looking forward to ...
Pilger: No, I haven't. I'm quite pleased with my answers. I hope you broadcast them as I've given them.
Hill: We broadcast you exactly as you are. It's been interesting to speak with you.

When I began as a journalist, especially as a foreign correspondent, the press in the UK was conservative and owned by powerful establishment forces, as it is now. But the difference compared to today is that there were spaces for independent journalism that dissented from the received 'wisdom' of authority. That space has now all but closed and independent journalists have gone to the internet, or to a metaphoric underground.

Twenty years ago today, in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a gun was fired close to where I was standing. One bullet passed over my shoulder and struck a woman in the face; another lodged in the brain of a man who almost certainly would have become president of the United States.
Robert Kennedy had seen his assassin leap on to a table and take aim; the flash of the little man's shiny yellow jacket remains indelible with me. "No!" Kennedy had screamed, half glancing for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He lay mortally wounded beside a refrigerator, half smiling, tousled hair, eternal youth applied for; the face on the posters.