IN: John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary film maker mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962. Pilger has been a strong critic of American, Australian and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over fifty documentaries since then.

William Shawcross wrote in his book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (1984) about Pilger's series of articles about Cambodia in the Daily Mirror during August 1979:  "A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust. Pilger called Pol Pot 'an Asian Hitler' -- and said he was even worse than Hitler . . . Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis. Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the Mirror, except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards. Their intellectual origins were described as 'anarchist' rather than Communist".  Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards. Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned.  Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Readers Digest and Francois Ponchaud. Nonetheless, the reaction to the stories in Britain was as if they were something quite new." Oliver Kamm asserted in 2006: "Pilger's documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others". In Heroes, Pilger disputes Francois Ponchaud and Shawcross's account of Vietnamesse atrocities during the Vietnamese invasion and near famine as being "unsubstantiated". Ponchard had interviewed members of anti-communist groups living in the Thai refugee border camps. According to Pilger, "At the very least the effect of Shawcross's 'expose'" of Cambodian's treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese "was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: in truth. a difference of night and day". In his book, Shawcross himself doubted that anyone had died of starvation.
QUESTION: What was a response to the book?
IN: Dunham was born in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is an artist and photographer, and a member of The Pictures Generation, known for her use of dolls and dollhouse furniture in her photographs of setup interior scenes. Her father is Protestant and of mostly English ancestry, and her mother is Jewish; Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that's the biggest cliche for a Jewish woman to say." The Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade.

Upon release, Girls was met with criticism regarding the all-white main cast in the otherwise culturally diverse setting of New York City (the only black actors in the pilot were a homeless man and a taxi driver, and the only Asian actress had the sole trait of being good at Photoshop). Agreeing that there is a lack of racial diversity on Girls, a comment from The Huffington Post argued that the issue is the industry as a whole.  Lesley Arfin, a writer for the show, responded sarcastically to the controversy with the tweeted comment about a movie that highlights an African-American girl's rise from incestuous sexual abuse while living in Harlem: "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." Arfin later deleted the comment following criticism on social media claiming her tweet was racist.  Dunham spoke publicly about the issues on several occasions. In an interview with IndieWire, she said:  I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like -- not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn't able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, 'I hear this and I want to respond to it.' And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can't speak to accurately.  Donald Glover guest starred as Sandy, a black Republican and Hannah's love interest, in the first two episodes of season two, which was criticized as tokenism in response to the initial backlash from the first season.
QUESTION:
Rise to what?