Situated and subjugated: Fixer knowledge in the global newsroom

Abstract

This article examines the role of the fixer in international news production, particularly war reportage, and reorients an ongoing debate about the role of local media-workers in foreign bureaus. While the institutional conditions of fixing have received some scholarly attention, the epistemic dimension of fixers’ labour yet requires critical examination. Utilizing eighteen months of participant observation and qualitative interviews with fixers and foreign journalists in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, I demonstrate that the local, ‘situated’ knowledge of fixers is both structural to, and ultimately suppressed by, the global, ‘professional’ knowledge of international news. This tension is evident in the routines of war reportage – gathering information, navigating checkpoints – and in journalism’s generic conventions, as where the byline – mark of professional authorship – establishes a hierarchy regarding what counts as authoritative meanings for war. In resituating analysis of fixing from the institutional to the epistemic, this article aims to recover the displacements inherent to normative representations of foreign conflict.

Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

“…Another pertinent example of Anglophone research bias concerns Russian-language international news production. While the Middle East has long been a central site for studies of localforeign news work (e.g., Murrell, 2015;Blacksin 2019;Arjomand 2022), the growth of Russian media in that regionand the subsequent employment of a local labor forcehas received correspondingly less attention.…”

“…As Blacksin (2019) demonstrates, international news is determined not by a single language or a single site of production and distribution but by a hegemonic economy of truth operating across languages and national borders, and which produces media bounded not by geography but by the professional practices, reigning ideologies, and generic conventions of local-foreign news work. The theory of decolonial epistemology can help to illuminate the specifically representational capacities offered by local news workers in contest with historically and culturally dominant models of news-truth.…”

“…4.One exception is Skrubbeltrang’s (2015) study of fixers in the Middle East who worked with Danish foreign correspondents. Arjomand (2022) and Blacksin (2019) also engage fixers working with French, Indian, and Japanese foreign journalists.…”