This book provides a local journalist's perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. It shows how the fixers' risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on Pakistan and Afghanistan borders, causing unprecedented deaths of the local reporters in the context of the U.S-led war on terror. The book analyzes the fixer as a role in its relationship with militarization. It is not a coincidence that fixers become valuable to commercial media only during the height of violence or crises. Emerging under conditions of scarcity or war, the value of this role, in turn, is intrinsically tied to the fear of extinction. It is this vulnerability or perceived expendability— imposed by the need to find work—that binds fixers in a symbiotic relationship with global market and global war. This book, then, serves as a vantage point from which one can clearly see the connection between the regional wars and commercial media, as well as local journalists' transformation into daily wage earners in a global media shift toward neoliberalism.
| The book argues that the definition of a "fixer" emerges when local journalists are de-professionalized and their field expertise and connections are stripped away to produce a faceless, nameless, set of "eyes and ears" in service of the 24/7 media machine. The fact that we have the same news 24/7 across a range of news channels is an outcome of the simultaneous process of centralized decentralization—media conglomerates controlling news distribution and exhibition by hiring a scattering of fixers to do the groundwork of global news production. But working as a daily wager in journalism is not about risks taken or the self-exploitation endured. Rather, the role is an attack on the basics of the profession itself, the basic dignity of the journalist as an upholder of democracy. A fixer, who must be the eyes and ears of the people against forces of status quo, is reduced to a role and given as an instrument in regular journalists' hands to be used as a resource. Challenging existing literature on the topic, the book reveals the tension between actual local reporters and the role (read fixer) they are hired to fill. The book argues that fixer as a role emerges in tandem with news practices that leads to decontextualizing local events, people and stories to fit the consumption patterns of market economy, a colonial practice resurging in contemporary capitalism.
The book holds not just the hierarchies in journalism responsible for feeding the dark underbelly of global news production, but also identifies the field inequality that produces violence against those local reporters. The issue is a quite serious challenge. Offering on-the-ground view of the situation from local perspectives, the book examines the consequences of the political economy of corporate media, and the price journalists pay for diminishing the life expectations as well as intellectual labor of journalists working as "fixers."
This book is unique in that it studies fixers not as a role but rather as a political position, objective condition and subjective experience. Theorizing on the emergence of the fixer as an outcome of colonial capitalism, the book brings Marx, himself a journalist, back into the twenty-first century discourse—taking discussions of intellectual labor back to the origins of capitalism—revealing how structural inequality takes a toll on journalism as a profession. As U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson once declared that the first casualty of war was truth, the book suggests that the sacrifice of truth has become a routine, both in liberal...

lgli/The Dark Side of News Fixing_nodrm.pdf

lgrsnf/The Dark Side of News Fixing_nodrm.pdf

zlib/no-category/Syed Irfan Ashraf/The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan_18799006.pdf

Ashraf, Syed Irfan

Ingram Publisher Services UK- Academic

Wimbledon Publishing Co

Anthem global media and communication studies, London, 2022

Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2), London, 2022

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

London ; New York, 2022

1, 20211102

FR, 2021

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Cover
Front Matter
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
About the author
Acknowledgments
Chapter Int-null
Introduction
The Local Relations of Global News Production
The “Fixer”: Marx’s Proletarian
The Local Journalist: The Three-Tier News Production Model
Methodological and Theoretical Applications
Outline of the Book
Chapter One Laying Bare the Malala Story
Molvi and Malala: The Story of Swat
The Destruction of Schools: Taliban Reviving Colonial Tradition
What If the Documentary Wins an Award?
Neoliberal Logic: Local Violence, Global Messiah
Did the NYT Put Malala in Harm’s Way?
Faceless Wars? Of Course Not
A “Fixer”: An Emotional Labor in Corporate Media
The “Fixer’s” Reflexive Experience: An Overview
Conclusion
Chapter Two The “Fixer”: Journalism’s Dark Secret
“Fixer”: Anatomical Metaphors and Subjugation
Global News Production: Changing Dynamics
The Parachute Journalist and the “Fixer”: A New Labor Formation
Global News Production: International Journalist, Local Proletarian
Precarious Labor: Consumer Markets and Flexible Labor
The Ideal Labor and the Terror “Enterprise”
Materiality of the Local Body: An Overview
The “Fixer”: A Hyper-Precarious Existence
Chapter Three Pashtuns as Potential “Fixers”: News Work in a State of War
Imperialist Games: Stateless Existence
Local Journalism in Colonized Space
Frontline State: Neoimperialism, Ethnicity and Media
Return of the Great Game: Media in Frontline State
The National Media: Local News Production
History Matters: Pashtuns under British Colonialism
Local Journalists Caught in a State of Global War
Conclusion
Chapter Four The Afghan Beat: Journalism as War
The Afghan Jihad: The Zia Era
Struggle against State Oppression
Imperialist War: Reporting Empowers the Disempowered
District Reporters: War, Solidarity and Social Exclusion
Capitalism and Jihad: Extremism at Large
A Seismic Shift in Local Journalism
Pashtun Reporters: Workers in the Imperialist Tradition
Domesticated Resistance
Strategic Depth Theory: Military Fallacy or Total War?
Conclusion
Chapter Five The “Fixer”: Local Labor, Global Media
Media Circus and al-Qaida’s Escape
The Pashtun Belt in the Grip of the War Frenzy
“Fixers”: Children of a Lesser God
How Did Local Reporters Become “Fixers”?
“Fixer”: A Key to Local Knowledge Network
Unethical Journalism: News Practices
Tabloid Press/Journalism
Shuttling between Supply and Demand Reporting
“Fixer” Field Position: Logistical or Editorial Labor?
Structural Compulsions: Working Precariously
“Fixer”: The Contradiction of Capital
News “Fixing”: Daily Wage Journalism
Chapter Six Buying Low, Selling High: The Hunt for bin Laden
The US Attack: Bin Laden—the Terror Prince
The District Reporters’ Hunt for al-Qaida
Post-attack Pack Journalism: Hunting for al-Qaida News
The Tora Bora Fiasco
Chance: The Canon of Conflict Reporting
The Shifting Relations of News Production
On-Demand Reporting
The al-Qaida Revolt
Divided Bodies, Siphoning Labor
News Contamination: The Cost of Labor Extraction
Global Media Shifting Priorities
The “Fixer”: An Embodiment of War
Chapter Seven Impunity: The New Normal
Privatization: The Irony of the State
Global Terrorists as “Special Guests”
Local Coverage, Global Implications
Trivializing Terror: The Redefinition of News Practices
News Primacy over Reporters’ Security
Kalusha Operation: Journalists Caught in the Cross Fire
The First Casualties of the War
Family: The Achilles’ Heel
Terrorism Got Mainstream: Military, Militants and Media
Video Journalist: A Hypervigilant Labor Function
Impunity: The Neoliberal Normal
Commercialism and Hyper-Precariousness: The Double Whammy
Global War on the Local
Chapter Eight Reporting with Marx
Labor and Capital: Marx’s Theory of Exploitation
Capitalist Temporality: Proletarian Insecurity
Making Sense of Global War
The “Fixer”: A Hope in Haze
A View from “Somewhere” versus a View from “Nowhere”
End Matter
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The book argues that the definition of a “fixer” emerges when local journalists are de-professionalized and their field expertise and connections are stripped away to produce a faceless, nameless, set of “eyes and ears” in service of the 24/7 media machine. The fact that we have the same news 24/7 across a range of news channels is an outcome of the simultaneous process of centralized decentralization—media conglomerates controlling news distribution and exhibition by hiring a scattering of fixers to do the groundwork of global news production. But working as a daily wager in journalism is not about risks taken or the self-exploitation endured. Rather, the role is an attack on the basics of the profession itself, the basic dignity of the journalist as an upholder of democracy. A fixer, who must be the eyes and ears of the people against forces of status quo, is reduced to a role and given as an instrument in regular journalists’ hands to be used as a resource. Challenging existing literature on the topic, the book reveals the tension between actual local reporters and the role (read fixer) they are hired to fill. The book argues that fixer as a role emerges in tandem with news practices that leads to decontextualizing local events, people and stories to fit the consumption patterns of market economy, a colonial practice resurging in contemporary capitalism. The book holds not just the hierarchies in journalism responsible for feeding the dark underbelly of global news production, but also identifies the field inequality that produces violence against those local reporters. The issue is a quite serious challenge. Offering on-the-ground view of the situation from local perspectives, the book examines the consequences of the political economy of corporate media, and the price journalists pay for diminishing the life expectations as well as intellectual labor of journalists working as “fixers.” This book is unique in that it studies fixers not as a role but rather as a political position, objective condition and subjective experience. Theorizing on the emergence of the fixer as an outcome of colonial capitalism, the book brings Marx, himself a journalist, back into the twenty-first century discourse—taking discussions of intellectual labor back to the origins of capitalism—revealing how structural inequality takes a toll on journalism as a profession. As U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson once declared that the first casualty of war was truth, the book suggests that the sacrifice of truth has become a routine, both in liberal democracies and in the war-torn Global South. The first casualty, in this reckoning, is not truth itself, but the bearers of truth, i.e., journalists, many of whom now find themselves reduced to the category of fixers.

This book provides a local journalist's perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. It shows how the fixers' risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on Pakistan and Afghanistan borders, causing unprecedented deaths of the local reporters in the context of the US-led war on terror. The book analyzes the fixer as a role in its relationship with militarization. It is not a coincidence that fixers become valuable to commercial media only during the height of violence or crises. Emerging under conditions of scarcity or war, the value of this role, in turn, is intrinsically tied to the fear of extinction. It is this vulnerability or perceived expendability - imposed by the need to find work - that binds fixers in a symbiotic relationship with global market and global war. This book, then, serves as a vantage point from which one can clearly see the connection between the regional wars and commercial media, as well as local journalists' transformation into daily wage earners in a global media shift toward neoliberalism

This Book Provides A Local Journalist's Perspective On A Four-decade Long Regional Contribution To Global News Production. Fixers Are Local Journalists Hired To Help Global Media Outlets In Developing News Stories On Wars. The Book Shows How The Fixers' Risky News Pursuits Made Possible For Global Media To Access Distant Regions And Dangerous Caves On Pakistan And Afghanistan Borders, Causing Unprecedented Deaths Of The Local Reporters In The Context Of The U.s-led War On Terror.

2022-01-19