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.