ABOUT

This is a site about the books and other writing by James Rodgers, author of Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin (new edition 2023; first published July 2020); Headlines from the Holy Land (2015 and 2017); No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (2013); Reporting Conflict (2012). My work looks at how stories of international affairs, especially armed conflict, are told to the world.

BIOGRAPHY

I am an author and journalist. During two decades of covering international news, I reported on the end of the Soviet Union; the wars in Chechnya; the coming to power of Vladimir Putin; 9/11; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the 2003 war in Iraq; Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008. I completed correspondent postings for the BBC in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza. I now teach in the Journalism Department at City, University of London.

Journalism in the Russia-Ukraine War, and soaring sales of ‘1984’: recent podcast and radio interviews

Posted On December 17, 2022

THIS MONTH I have recorded two new podcast interviews, the first for Silicon Curtain with Jonathan Fink

If you have not come across this series, do take a look at the other interviews, too. Jonathan gets excellent guests and the audience continues to grow. This time, Jonathan and I talked about the challenges of reporting from Russia, and what that will mean for the way that those of us outside the country can and cannot understand what is happening there–at a time when we really need to.

Earlier this week, I was also a guest on ‘War in Ukraine: update from Kyiv’ with Jessica Genauer.

You can listen to that here.

On Saturday 17th December, I was also a guest on the BBC World Service’s ‘Weekend’ programme.

I talked about the soaring sales in Russia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four during the Putin era and especially since the start of the war in Ukraine. You can listen to that here from around 17’15. The enthusiasm for Orwell’s work in Russia today seems to me to be the latest example of Russians, during one of those periods in their history when then are deprived of free expression in politics and the press, of turning to literature to look for interpretations of the world around them.

I am currently in discussions about doing some live events in early 2023 about the Russia Ukraine war. I will share details here when I have them.

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