IN HIS long career as a journalist and filmmaker, John Pilger is used to getting under the skins of warmongers, imperialists and those who wield and abuse power. But it's the members of Pilger's own profession who face tough criticism in his latest film The War You Don't See.

Here, the former war correspondent reveals some uncomfortable truths about the reporting of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He questions what he regards to be the problematic practice of "embedding" journalists within the military command and strongly suggests that had the Western media properly interrogated the reasons for those interventions, they might not have happened.

Ironically, the idea of the film came not from Pilger but an executive at ITV, whose editor-in-chief David Mannion was grilled rigorously by Pilger. As Pilger notes optimistically, that type of self-analysis by the media has not happened before.

The catalyst, he contends, was the invasion of Iraq, in whose aftermath the media became self-critical about its own role in disseminating vital — but often false — information justifying the invasion and to lose "that particular defensiveness that journalists have about what we do".