About 20 or 25 years ago someone I respected said to me that they particularly celebrated John Pilger. And so a little while later I bought a recently published book written by him, expecting to have great scandals revealed. There was some amount of that, but substantially I found this book full of neo-colonialist conspiracy theories, and with some apologism for nasty dictators. What I read there seemed similar to what I also saw in the sad distortions of people like George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn, who saw nothing but evil in capitalist democracies, and likewise acted as apologists for evil dictators.
It is an issue that clever people sometimes get themselves stuck to stupid ideas. Clever people are better at constructing reasons a hypothesis is still tenable despite growing evidence against them (self-deception - see Robert Trivers' book on that). Certainly the authorities in countries like the USA do some evil and corrupt things. If you are in the business of ferreting that out, with the advantage you can actually find stuff out in open places like the USA, maybe you come away with this idea that they the evil empire. And so maybe you get this distorted view that they are worse than the actual evil empires in places like Russia, China, Iran, etc.
It was interesting to me to read some of the numerous encomiums we saw on his death, which did not mention this issue in his later career. And I thought, maybe they are going a bit de mortuis nil nisi bonum on him. From that I was able to realise that earlier in his life Pilger might have been this great campaigning journalist who inspired my friend. But sadly I saw him only after he had turned into something else, disconnected from reality and with unpleasant allegiances.
In general you you can no more believe a word you read in the Telegraph, Times, etc, than the Mail and Express these days. So a bit sad that this is the only place so far where I have found a bit of balance.