Description

Natalia Roudakova is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2007) working in the field of political communication and comparative media studies, with a broad interest in moral philosophy and political and cultural theory. She has worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, University of California in San Diego, and as Visiting Scholar in the Media and Communication Department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam (Netherlands) and in the Department of Communication at Södertörn University, Stockholm (Sweden). In 2013-2014, Roudakova was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, where she completed her book, titled Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia which is now out with Cambridge University Press.

Losing Pravda examines the spectacular professional unraveling of journalism in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and its broader social and cultural effects. Roudakova argues that a crisis of journalism is unlike any other: it fundamentally erodes the value of truth-seeking and truth-telling in a society. In many ways, Roudakova tracks how a post-truth society comes into being. Russia’s case thus becomes far from unique, illuminating instead the historical and cultural emergence of phenomena such as “fake news,” misinformation (kompromat), and general distrust in politics and public life that have now begun to plague Western democracies as well. Roudakova’s account of one country’s loss of the culture of truth-seeking can serve as an important “wake-up call” for Western nations going forward.