The Second Oldest Profession: Journalism, Cynicism, and Truth-Telling in Post Soviet Russia

Natalia Roudakova
Communications
UC San Diego

This book-in-progress is both an institutional ethnography of journalism in Russia and a study of broad cultural shifts after the fall of the Soviet Union. The study contends that one of the most important casualties of post-Soviet transformation has been the erosion of truth-seeking as a value, and that journalism and journalists had much to do with it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the project shows how Soviet journalists–before 1989–often exercised a truth-seeking ethic displayed through seriousness and sincerity that, in complicated ways, spoke truth to power. This moral connection between the press and its public came undone after the fall of the Soviet Union, as press freedom became radically devalued, following a wave of media privatizations and sales of journalistic services to the highest bidder. The book traces how a radical devaluation of press freedom became possible in this atmosphere, and how it articulated with other varieties of state-sponsored cynicism under Putin.