Natalia Roudakova, “Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. Drawing from more than a decade of research of various ethnographic and historical sources, Roudakova approaches truth as a social category. She demonstrates that the status of truth was relatively secure and stable under the Soviet state socialism. It was the transformation from communism to capitalism that led to a drastic dissolution of a sense of responsibility towards the public and, consequently, into the very possibility to produce truth in the post-socialist era. Looking into everyday practices of Soviet journalists and the post-socialist transformation of the media, Losing Pravda provides a glimpse into one possible future of the US and other post-truth settings in the West. Exploring how truth-seeking and truth-telling work under different socio-political conditions, it offers a new, ethics-based vocabulary for thinking about production of facts and meaning in contemporary world.

Carna Brkovic is a Lecturer at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She is an author of Managing Ambiguity, winner of the 2015 SIEF Young Scholar prize, and an anthropologist exploring humanitarianism, clientelism, and activism in former Yugoslav countries.

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