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 St George’s, University of London.

The author in Berlin, February 2023. Photo © Kevin Cummins

Tag: Disinformation

Misfits on the Frontline of Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War

February 28, 2026
A review of Believable Lies: The Misfits Who Fought Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War by Terry Stiastny (WH Allen, 2025) IN A CITY STUNNED BY DEFEAT IN WAR the government official I spoke to was clear, and defiant. He had used words, not weapons, when his country fought against a...

Disinformation: born in the last century, thriving in this one

February 18, 2022
‘Dezinformatsiya’—meaning ‘disinformation’ in Russian—is a 20th century word that symbolizes perfectly the communications field between the Moscow elite and the West in the 21st century. During the current confrontation over Ukraine—and the different portrayals of that crisis in press and public opinion in the West and Russia—that field has...