The Fixers

Abstract

Abstract This book conducts a cultural analysis of the labor of the news fixer—the locally based media employee who helps international correspondents research stories, set up interviews, translate foreign languages, and navigate unfamiliar regions. Foreign reporters often say that their work would be impossible without these local news assistants. Yet, fixers are among some of the most exploited and persecuted people contributing to the production of international news. Targeted by militant groups, by their own governments, or even by their own neighbors, fixers must often engage in a precarious balancing act between appeasing their community members and pleasing the correspondents who visit from faraway. Though foreign news outlets routinely depend upon news fixers’ insider awareness of politically tense situations in order to keep their own reporters safe in the field, fixers themselves continually face detainment, injury, and death. Even so, international news organizations almost never provide their fixers with hazardous environment training or medical insurance. What is more, fixers rarely receive professional credit from the reporters who hire them, suggesting that their often life-threatening labor is deeply undervalued. Drawing upon 75 interviews with fixers from 39 different countries, this book argues that although fixers’ labor is essential to international news reporting, it is still relegated to the shadows of the international news industry.

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