Steve Rosenberg, ace reporter in Moscow: far better than any of my peers in Alt Media, far better than his own employers at the BBC

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In recent essays, I have mentioned a couple of times the podcasts that BBC Moscow senior journalist Steve Rosenberg has been putting out daily. The main mission he achieves is to provide a comprehensive daily overview of the Russian print media.  Note: he does not touch the electronic media, which is much more state controlled and less nuanced than the newspapers and periodicals.

But that is only the overriding theme of his podcasts. The content varies widely, day by day, according to what he finds especially worth reporting on, as we see in today’s podcast:

. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJvbFdaXzSM

I particularly recommend to the Community his street interviews of average Muscovites on their feelings about Donald Trump after the midterm elections.  This is a level of journalism that no one in Western media is capable of doing or seems to have an interest in doing. And it is invaluable.  

Yes, it is just a sampling, not a statistically founded report.  But it is done with great skill and intelligence.

I wish to emphasize that these podcasts by Rosenberg run directly counter to the anti-Russian propaganda that his employer, the BBC, puts on air 24/24 and 7/7.  How they reconcile what he is doing with what they are doing is beyond understanding. As for him, I imagine that Rosenberg is very glad to have to his BBC job, which gives him unequaled access to Russians, at the top, on the street and wherever he wishes to go.

I would say that Rosenberg is doing the same kind of sound reporting that you will find regularly in The Financial Times, where the editorial position is deeply anti-Russian but many of the journalists are…professional journalists with their own agenda of investigating and writing about very important developments in and around Russia and Ukraine, such as today’s reporting on the Russian equivalent to Starlink that is now being  put in space. This is a factual report which was immediately posted on Russian news websites in extensive translation.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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