Episode 148: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible with Peter Pomerantsev

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Guest bio + book links:

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Arena Initiative.

Between 2017-2020, he was a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital era disinformation and polarisation. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4. His new book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019 and has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize and was a Times Book of the Year.

Peter has testified on the challenges of information war and media development to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He was a specialist advisor on the ‘UK Parliamentary Committee on Fake News’, and was a member of USC Annenberg’s ‘Transatlantic Working Group on Internet Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression. He is a columnist at the American Interest, and writes for publications including the NY Times, Granta and The Atlantic. Between 2002 and 2014 he was a television producer on documentaries and factual entertainment programs for major networks including the Discovery Channel and the BBC. He continues to present and write radio documentaries for the BBC Radio 4, most recently on disinformation about climate change.

Peter is frequently asked to host policy seminars at NATO, the EU, the UK FCO, German Foreign Office, U.S. State Department, as well as numerous public events. He has helped write in-depth policy recommendations on counter-propaganda and media diversity for both national governments and NGOs, including the UK Foreign Office’s Strategic Communication policies for Russia and the Western Balkans.’ He has given seminars and talks on the subject of propaganda and media at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia and Princeton. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible:

This is Not Propaganda:

How to Win an Information War: