Politics & Power Quote by John Pilger

“I grew up in Sydney in a very political household, where we were all for the underdog” is Pilger giving you his origin story, but in the most strategically Australian way possible: plainspoken, egalitarian, and implicitly suspicious of power. “Political household” doesn’t mean party membership so much as a daily, lived orientation - a home where the news isn’t background noise but a moral weather report. The phrase cues class and culture in mid-century Sydney: Labor traditions, union influence, postwar austerity, and a civic instinct that reads authority as something to be checked, not admired.

The underdog line is doing heavy reputational work. Pilger isn’t just explaining sympathy; he’s staking a claim to a journalism of alignment. “We were all for” frames advocacy as inherited common sense, not an ideological choice he later adopted. That matters because Pilger’s career - from Vietnam to East Timor to Iraq - has been both celebrated and attacked for its prosecutorial tone. By rooting his stance in family formation, he pre-empts the critique that his reporting is merely contrarian or anti-West reflex. It’s presented as a loyalty to the outgunned, the silenced, the occupied.

There’s also a quiet confession about the limits of neutrality. Pilger’s sentence implies that “balance” is often just a polite term for giving the powerful their customary microphone. The subtext: if you start by believing the underdog, you’ll ask different questions, notice different omissions, and accept that journalism is never innocent of where it stands.