Liberalism in fragments: oligarchy and the liberal subject in Ukrainian news journalism

This article explores the place of liberal subjectivity in the professional culture of Ukrainian journalists to analyse how ideas originating in contexts of hegemonic liberalism at the core of the global capitalist system, are taken up on its postsocialist margins. I outline how certain Anglo-American notions of good journalistic practice, which encode traits of liberal subjectivity, are borrowed and elaborated by a Western-funded movement for an anti-oligarchic liberal media reform in Ukraine. These ideals are then taken up within oligarch-controlled media, a context that the reformers see as inimical to liberalism. Through an ethnographic portrait of an editor-censor at a major oligarch-owned TV channel in Ukraine, I analyse how these professional ideals simultaneously uphold oligarchic patronage and extend the reach of liberal politics in Ukraine. This reveals how in the force field of global capitalism both the reformers and those whom they seek to reform are part of the same, contradictory and fractured, liberal formation. I propose that to better understand cases like this, we need to learn to see liberalism in fragments: as always partial and incomplete and as constituted by multiple elements. Cet article explore la place de la subjectivité libérale dans la culture professionnelle des journalistes ukrainiens afin d’analyser un processus plus général par lequel les idées liberals sont transférées des contextes du libéralisme hégémonique au coeur du système capitaliste mondial, vers ses marges postsocialistes. Je décris comment certains idéaux anglo-américains de bonne pratique journalistique, qui codent les traits de la subjectivité libérale, sont empruntés et élaborés par un mouvement financé par l’Occident pour une réforme libérale anti-oligarchique du journalisme ukrainien ; et j’examine comment ces idéaux sont repris dans les médias contrôlés par les oligarques, un contexte que les réformateurs considèrent comme hostile au libéralisme. À travers le portrait ethnographique d’une rédactrice-correctrice d’une grande chaîne de télévision ukrainienne détenue par des oligarques, j’analyse la façon dont elle retravaille ces idéaux professionnels de manière à soutenir le patronage oligarchique et à étendre la portée du libéralisme en Ukraine. Cela révèle comment, dans le champ de forces contradictoires du capitalisme mondial, les réformateurs et ceux qu’ils cherchent à reformer font partie du même libéralisme existant. Je propose que pour mieux comprendre des cas comme celui-ci, nous devions apprendre à voir le libéralisme par fragments : comme toujours partiel et incomplet, et comme constitué d’éléments multiples. Liberalism is everywhere in contemporary anthropology, yet almost everywhere it seems out of focus: a blurred background of ‘Western culture’ against which ethnographers examine the world of ethnographic difference (cf. Candea 2021; Fedirko et al. 2021; Mazzarella 2018; Schiller 2015). Only relatively recently have anthropologists turned the ethnographic lens onto liberalism itself, exploring both contexts in which hegemonic liberalism constitutes common political sense and those where liberal projects can be more clearly seen as narrow mobilisations coalescing around specific group interests (Dzenovska 2018; Englund 2011; Hadley 2010; Mazzarella 2018; Schiller 2013). To contribute to this growing literature and our special collection’s efforts to systematise it for purposes of anthropological comparison, this article analyses a non-hegemonic, minoritarian form of ‘media liberalism’ at the postsocialist semi-periphery of the global capitalist system. I explore how ideals of good professional practice in Ukrainian news reporting encode certain elements of liberal subjectivity; how they are ‘imported’ and elaborated in the context of a transnationally connected movement for an anti-oligarchic liberal reform of Ukrainian journalism; and how they are taken up, reworked and reproduced within oligarch-controlled media – a context that avowed liberal reformers in Ukraine see as inimical to liberal governance, individual freedom and vocational public service. In so doing, I investigate the tensions between liberalism as ideology and liberalism as a set of institutions in a context where a combination of Western-supported projects of building liberal democracy to secure the margins of the ‘empire of capital’ (Yurchenko 2017) come into conflict with political-economic arrangements of oligarchic patronage through which the emergent postsocialist bourgeoisie has become integrated into this ‘empire’. Anthropologists of European postsocialisms have argued that the ‘unmaking’ of state socialism was a complex, path-dependent and open-ended transformation, rather than a linear transition to liberal democracy and capitalism (for an overview, see Rogers and Verdery 2013). Yet, in Ukraine and across the broader postsocialist region (e.g. in Serbia, Greenberg 2014), local intelligentsia, university students and middle-class professionals embraced the possibility of transitioning to liberalism as a comprehensive, deliberate project of individual and collective change. They relied on Western financial and political backing, and allied with local national-democratic parties originally formed by late-Soviet dissidents and reformers, to bring Ukraine into the fold of liberal modernity exemplified by the Euro-Atlantic order. They sought to transform Ukraine’s political system and culture, including by reforming the journalistic profession, so as to guarantee rule of law, protect human rights and promote capitalist markets free from state interference and oligarchic privilege. These efforts have grounded liberal ideology – part-developed locally, part-imported thanks to Western ‘technical advisers’ and project funding – in a set of activist organisations that have regularly supplied new recruits for Western-oriented political parties, but had only intermittent success in realising their programme, and enjoy rather limited public legitimacy. At the same time, however, elaborated within this milieu, elements of this liberalism have had a more diffuse, fragmentary influence beyond their main ‘organisational base’ in the civil society. Ukrainian journalism is exemplary in this regard. Over the past two decades in Ukraine, in response to what many journalists perceive as a deepening crisis of professional legitimacy (cf. Roudakova 2017), there has emerged a movement for a moral-professional reform of the journalistic profession. This movement has opposed censorship and political instrumentalisation of news by media owners and politicians, as well as various forms of unprofessional or unethical behaviour among journalists themselves. It has borrowed from Anglo-American occupational ideals of newswork as defined by ‘balanced objectivity’, impartiality and collective self-regulation (Bishara 2013; Lebovic 2016; Schudson 1981) to formulate standards of professional conduct that extoll journalistic autonomy and mandate vigilance to possible signs of outside influence or interference. These standards encapsulate visions of individuality, freedom, authentic creativity and individual rationality as a means of achieving a broader public good, which have long been recognised as centrepieces of the broad liberal tradition in the West. In Ukraine, this genealogical tradition has been refracted through the humanism and commitment to public service of the late-Soviet intelligentsia (Roudakova 2017; Tromly 2014), and later influences from the West, for instance through British and American-backed skills development projects that sought to develop ‘independent media’ as a way of democratising Ukraine (cf. Wedel 1998). According to media watchdogs leading the movement, the mainstream oligarch-owned media use news as instruments for securing the political and economic power of their owners. 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