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.