The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan

By Syed Irfan Ashraf

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839981395

Book preview

The Dark Side of News Fixing

The Dark Side of News Fixing

The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Syed Irfan Ashraf

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Syed Irfan Ashraf 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946495

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-137-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-137-7 (Hbk)

Cover credit: Covering the mountains of war-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan, a site for the Hunt for Bin Laden.

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Ayesha, my daughter.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

About the Author

Acknowledgments

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: Some Tough and Painful Reflections on the Fixer Role

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

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1Local journalists interview the Swat Taliban spokesperson Muslim Khan

2Malala Yousafzai, Syed Irfan Ashraf and Adam Ellick

3Screenshots showing systematic disappearance of the fixer’s labor

4Rahimullah Yousafzai, a veteran local journalist, interviewing war-hit common people

5A senior local photojournalist Abdul Ghaffar Beg is sitting along with a Mujahidin fighter in Afghanistan’s Jalalabad city

6Abdul Ghaffar Beg, a veteran local photojournalist

7Rahimullah Yusufzai during his interview with the researcher

8The Spin Ghar mountain range on the Pakistan side

9The local Taliban groups

10Foreign journalists and their fixers

11TV crew of a global TV network

12The US assault on October 7, 2001

13A few members of the foreign media in Jalalabad

14Majeed Babar, fixer

15The Afghan warlord Hazrat Ali addressing Western journalists in a press conference

16Foreign journalists at a Thanksgiving Day dinner

17Afghan villagers using irregular routes on the snow-laden Tora Bora mountains

18Sufi’s volunteers, held in captivity by Afghan warlord Hazrat Ali

19An al-Qaida operative being taken away by soldiers

20Mud houses destroyed in a heavy overnight US bombing

21Rescue operation

22A family head helplessly watches graves

23An unexploded US bomb

24People leaving their bordering localities

About the Author

Syed Irfan Ashraf

PhD Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, United States.

Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Peshawar, Pakistan. E-mail: [e-mail]

One year prior to the completion of my graduation in journalism, I started field reporting in 1996. For over a decade and a half, I was a local journalist working with local and national newspapers. In 2002, I was invited to teach part-time Public Relations at the Department of Journalism, University of Peshawar. In 2006 I took leave from the university and joined a newly launched English TV channel, Dawn News to became its local reporter in Peshawar. It was in this job that I started reporting on the war on terror spread out from Swat to the ex-FATA, a brewing site of al-Qaida’s global terrorism. I also worked with different foreign news networks as a fixer including the NYT. In 2010, I once again started teaching at the Department of Mass Communication, University of Peshawar, but remained connected with practical journalism by writing articles for the country’s leading English-language daily Dawn. My journalistic work was mainly related to writing commentary and making TV packages on militancy and media in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal belt (FATA). In 2012, I went for PhD to the United States. In 2014, Syracuse University awarded me the Mirror Award for best commentary on legacy media. I was a coproducer of the award-winning documentary on Malala titled "Class Dismissed." I completed my PhD in 2018 and resumed teaching as assistant professor at the Department of Journalism, University of Peshawar, Pakistan.

Acknowledgments

This book is a political project. Its idea came into being on October 9, 2012, the day the teenaged activist Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat valley. Working as a local journalist in the same troubled area, I lost several colleagues and survived close calls myself many times, but this attack on the girl child was for me the most shocking one. I knew Malala and her father before, but my interaction with the family increased after I started working as fixer for the New York Times (NYT). I coproduced a documentary for NYT’s website, which played a minor role in introducing the activist to the outside world. After I left for higher studies in the United States, the tragedy happened, which haunted me about my role in exposing the teenaged girl to the Taliban. I began to read about the consequences of war reporting from a de-professionalized position called fixers. What I found in academic literature added to my concern. I was surprised by the scarcity of critical insights into the dark aspect of the 24/7 news economy. In this book, therefore, I adopt a radical political economy approach: I intend to situate local journalists in Pakistan at the center of the challenges associated with the news production in conflict scenario. I aim to show how for over four decades, the war in Afghanistan grew into a lucrative news economy in Pakistan. Also, how a jihadi form of war reporting became a function of the 24/7 news cycles, glorifying militants and extremists as heroes at the cost of the region’s peace and global security. Who gets to tell these stories, therefore, becomes a tug of war between parties vying for discursive as well as physical control over events. This inquiry is crucial in the contemporary context of post-US withdrawal from Afghanistan and reveals how deeply connected is the role of global media and local journalists to Al-Qaida and the Taliban related violence perpetrated in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am indebted to all those local Pakistani journalists who shared with me their experience and stories of personal pain and anguish in working riskily as fixers for elite global media outlets.

This book is a revised version of my PhD dissertation I submitted to the school of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University (SIU). I am indebted to so many people that calling them one by one will be difficult. A few of them, however, need a special mention here. I was lucky to have Dr. Jyotsna Kapur as my PhD supervisor. Initially, I found it difficult to develop a conceptual foothold to support my field experiences. Not only that she listened to me patiently, but her confidence in what I shared with her also always encouraged me to further refine my ideas. She introduced me to Karl Marx. Why is Marx’s framework not so often used in journalism? I often thought ever since. Without Dr. Kapur’s insights this book would not have served its purpose. Though I will never be able to return her debt, I will make sure to transmit her legacy to my students.

Many thanks also to my PhD committee members, teachers, friends and reviewers. I greatly benefited from the ideas of Dr. Cinzia Padovani, Dr. Dong Han, Dr. Metz and Dr. Jean-Pierre Reed. I nurtured my critical ideas sitting in PhD classes of Dr. Lisa Brooten, Dr. Eileen Meehan and Dr. Lawrence Novotny. In my hard times on SIU campus, I got support from Jan Roddy, Dr. Aaron Veenstra and Dr. Bill Babcook. I always discussed my ideas with fellow PhD students Dr. Lindani Memani, Soumik Pal and Muhammad Farooq. They were all very helpful in stimulating my ideas. The suggestions I got from my copy editors, Sarah VanGundi, Nilim Gupta and Debadatta Chakraborty, helped me in converting my dissertation into the book form. I also availed Dr. Robin Andersen’s generous help to enrich my understanding on the topic. My generous friend Dr. John Downing read the book’s manuscript word by word to provide me a long list of critical notes. I am also thankful to all those who took part in double-blind review process of the book. From one deadline to another, Megan Grieving and Jayashree (of Anthem Press) patiently facilitated the execution of this project. All these precious thoughts, critical notes, timely suggestions and generous support enabled me to revisit each chapter of the book so that to further improve this work.

My time in SIU was not only academically productive; it also was culturally very rich. Many thanks to Dr. Naushad Ali, former chairperson of the Physics Department at SIU, and his wife, Donna Ali, for their love and care. My teacher Dr. Wago Krieder and his partner Jessica Allie made Carbondale feel like a home for me. Dr. Lisa Brooten provided me a chance to visit historical/cultural places in the United States, which otherwise would not have been possible on my own. I will remember the warmth, love and hospitality these friends bestowed upon me in my stay on and off the campus.

We know that book writing is a collective project. My friends, Dr. Faizullah Jan, Dr. Taimur Khan, Dr. Lindani and Soumik Pal, often left their own work to review drafts of my book. When I got enrolled in PhD program, these friends were doctorate students in the United States. They remained very busy, yet gave me hours to discuss raw ideas of my interests. My former students Dr. Fawad Ali Shah, Azmat Afridi, Zahid Ihsas and Shahbano Durrani were available whenever I asked them for help. They provided technical expertise in finishing this project. My teachers Hafiz Sanaullah, Dr. Shahjehan, Dr. Naeem Gul and Inamur Rehman were my support system back in the University of Peshawar where I teach at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. My friend Peter Oborne encouraged me to write and helped me publish my work in professional magazines. The ideas I developed back have found their place in this book. Sarah Vangundy, Nilim Gupta and Suhaila Meera deserve my special thanks for their editing work. They refined my writings in the process of transforming this dissertation into a book form.

Academic research connects you with one set of valuable new friends but at the same time keeps you away from another set of time-tested relationships. My hope to reconnect with my family after completion of my degree fractured after my dear father developed COVID-19 complications and died within months of my arrival in Pakistan. I wanted him to hold this book in his hands before leaving us, but this did not happen. My only daughter, Ayesha, lived without me throughout my PhD years. I dedicate this book to her. She was 2 years old when I left. She is 12 years old now. She does not know me well. It is a painful but humbling experience to know about life this way. In coping with this challenge, I am grateful to my mother Shamim Bibi, my brother Noman Ashraf, sister Sabiha Ashraf, sister-in-law Rabail and brother-in-law Shahjehan. Living together, I learn from them in different ways. Learning is the best temptation to understand relations, relationships and their interplay. Life itself is a social debt and we have a collective responsibility to learn from living it to make this world a better place to live.

Peshawar University Campus

2021

INTRODUCTION

The bright brown eyes of a young girl popped from the large computer screen on an editing console. Walking by the desk of my journalist colleague, I stopped to take a look at the edit; a report sent from a violent conflict zone of Pakistan was being translated into English for that night’s news bulletin. The girl spoke with a shaky voice. I am very frightened, she said crisply. Our siblings are terrified, and we cannot come to school. She spoke an Urdu of startling refinement for a rural Pashtun child. "Who is that mashoma (a girl child)? I asked my news colleague. Malala," he replied nonchalantly (Brenner, 2013). A year later in 2009, a local BBC reporter saw in Malala an Anne Frank, a diarist of Jewish origin who narrated her ordeal before she was sent to a concentration camp during the Second World War. At the same time, the New York Times (NYT) hired me as fixer to make a documentary on her struggle. "If there were no BBC, no New York Times and no channels, Malala once said, then my voice would not have reached the people" (BBC Urdu, 2012). Mostly carried out by local reporters, the global media coverage projected the mashoma as a symbol of defiance against the Taliban, which led the latter to shoot her in the head in 2012. Luckily, the mashoma survived. Her unrelenting defiance even led her to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Ever since, Malala lives in self-exile in England along with her family. Was the pre-teen Malala’s defiance equivalent to informed consent? Was the mashoma capable of assessing the threat that the video could pose to her life? Did the corporate media commodify the child’s defiant image for revenue and ratings? All these questions are still being raised in the context of the war on terror in Pakistan. While I will share my detailed reflections on these questions in the next chapter, what gets ignored here is the journalists’ role as fixers. This chapter will establish a relationship between war and journalism. This inquiry is crucial in the contemporary context of post-US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has also left the bordering regions of Pakistan in deep chaos. As the Afghan Taliban’s second rising to power in Afghanistan is being blamed on the Pakistani State, this book connects the role of the local Pashtun journalists and global media to show how deeply they are both invested in this systemic violence in the Pashtun dominated bordering regions, a conduit for the Taliban militancy destabilizing inland Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Using Malala’s story as a point of departure, therefore, I first highlight in this chapter the local journalists’ challenges in global news production and connect this labor precarity to systemic imperialist violence. While a few media conglomerates control the channels of distribution and exhibition the world over, the work of 24/7 commercial news cycle is carried out by local reporters, who aid the global media as fixers in the process of working on risky stories of wider significance in global market. As the value of this news work is intrinsically tied to the fear of extinction, it is this perceived expendability—imposed by the need to find work under local conditions of scarcity—that binds fixer in a symbiotic relationship with global frontline news market and global warfare. News fixing emerged in Pakistan, I argue, as a so-called role parallel to decontextualization of local events, people and stories that are being reduced to news and sound bites to desirably fit into the consumption patterns of free-market economy. I acted as a fixer in working on Malala’s story for global media, but even in this marginalized and precarious position, I contributed to the destructiveness of the initially titled global war on terror. My knowledge, skills, and purpose were all used to work against my own hope. This book then examines how the local journalists, who reported on regional imperialist wars—not restricted to the war on terror—are at the same time victims as well as agents. Doing a dangerous work of reporting local war stories, they not only struggle at the intersection of media capital, State power and neoimperialism, but they also shape 24/7 news cycle of global media ecosystem. Before I go further, however, I put quotation marks around fixer, a term I want to defamiliarize and denaturalize to make it the subject of my critical inquiry. Such terms, when used unproblematically, dehumanize workers into some automatons bereft of thinking and feeling self.

I come to this study after a decade and a half of working as a local journalist and fixer reporting for national and global media, respectively. In 2006, I joined Dawn News, an English-language national TV channel, as a local reporter in its Peshawar bureau office. As the cultural hub of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (KP) in Pakistan, Peshawar is one of the oldest living cities in South Asia going as far back as 539 BC. Traditional architecture of the region and scores of archeological sites offer glimpses of the city’s splendid past as the ancient capital of Gandhara civilization. The city is a corridor that connects—some 40 miles at Torkham—Central Asian states via Afghanistan to northwestern fringes of the Indian subcontinent (the current-day Pakistan) (See Map-1 in appendix). Trade and traffic converged on Peshawar for centuries to take plain exit routes to Central India in the north, a strategic significance that attracted different imperial powers in their fight for control of this gateway. The US-led war on terror is not a break from the past. It is, instead, a regional history in continuity. This contested territorial centrality makes Peshawar the hub of regional information. Using this unique vantage point, I show how the development of local journalism took place on the cusp of this imperialist warfare and the way the local media landscape enforces this deathly politics in the service of the global news economy.

Working in Peshawar, the local journalists not only monitor happenings on southern plains of the city connecting KP with mainstream Pakistan, but also oversee from here developments on the sparsely populated northwestern mountainous strip protruding deep into Afghanistan’s land-locked southern provinces (See Map-5 in appendix). Called in colonial parlance the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), this bordering strait was officially merged into the adjoining KP in 2018, yet I call it ex-FATA in view of the book’s focus on a premerger regional phase of weaponized local journalism. Because this stretch of land is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns, I call it the Pashtun Belt. Using this vantage point, my insights in this book will serve as a springboard for a broader analysis of the ramifications of war to understand some frontline aspects of news production in restive parts of Pakistan bordering the war-torn Afghanistan.

In other words, I want to show how the local journalists are compelled to invest their labor in the neoimperialist wars and the global market and the way this combination has turned the region into a ground zero. Though it would be hard to divide the world into war zones and peace zones, I use ground zero to emphasize the severity of the militarized violence’s devastation. The effects of this systemic violence on the lives, bodies and land of the local journalists show how deeply the regional militarization and the global news market are intertwined in the worldwide shift to neoliberalism, a symbiotic connection at the heart of the inquiry I make to question the fixer role. As a journalist on the front lines, I could not raise these questions, partly due to the pressures of earning a living and partly because asking questions would have made it impossible to continue to work. Ultimately, I quit journalism to join academia and moved later to America for higher studies. But my passion for analyzing the imperialist war in my first home remains intact. This book is the outcome of my academic fieldwork as well as journalistic experiences/reflections as part of the local news reporters’ everyday struggle to cover their ethnic community caught at the intersection of the global news market, State power and imperialist warfare at the conflict zone of the Pashtun Belt.

The Local Relations of Global News Production

The Pashtun Belt had historically been home to scores of scattered ethnic Pashtun tribes living for centuries in the region. Separated from contemporary Afghanistan by the nineteenth-century British Empire of United India, around 17 million Pashtuns still live in Afghanistan—these tribes represent the largest ethnic group in the country’s 37.5 million total population (The World Factbook, 2021). In 1947, following the British withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent, major parts of the Pashtun Belt such as ex-FATA and KP (ex-Northwest Frontier Province) became part of Pakistan. Ever since, 25 million Pashtuns live in Pakistan (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, 2017), which approximately is 16 percent of the country’s 200.2 million population. However, they are still controlled by the lingering effects of oppressive laws emerged from the nineteenth-century British regime’s rivalry with the Russian empire. Consequently, the prime worth that the Pashtun land holds in post-partition Pakistan’s strategic calculus is as a buffer zone or sand bag that is used for across-the-border military adventures, and its ethnic Pashtun population is treated as war fodder, foot soldiers and collateral damage. Even the local Pashtun reporters derive their identity from the colonial legacy of the unending militarization for control of this strategic bordering strip populating ethnic Pashtuns. Knowing from which way the ferocious winds of regional wars blow is defining the worth of these reporters’ bread and butter.

The term fixer emerged in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. Organized and systemic violence around the world raised the need to introduce low-cost news practices for the coverage of wars and conflicts. Media networks often removed their long-term foreign correspondents and replaced them with agile parachute journalists flown in and out of the war zone (Macdonald, 2008, p. 215). The parachute reporter, hopping from one country to another, lacks local skills, familiarity with language, places and contacts. Filling the gap of experience in reporting on offshore land, therefore, compels parachute journalists and media networks to depend on hiring fixers (Hannerz, 2004, p. 47; Palmer, 2019; Palmer & Fontan, 2007, p. 21; Pendry, 2015). This role, which is predominantly defined in academic literature as a blend of logistical and editorial functions, explains not only a local reporter’s relationship with parachute journalists. But this editorial and logistical categorization also follows an ambivalent work division, which I examine in this book as an intense labor marginalization and de-skilling of local journalists as well as a reduction of local journalism itself.

Pakistan is an appropriate instance of this labor de-professionalization. A couple of Pashtun journalists, who I interviewed for this book, said that they had heard the term fixer for the first time when they helped international journalists to report on the civil war across the border in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. At that time the local journalists were called stringers, a term that predates fixer. Locally considered a better work status, the former is a freelance journalist not necessarily restricted to a war zone or any foreign country. A stringer is hauled in for a very local rural disaster of some ilk and is also paid some remuneration on monthly basis along with getting byline for news stories despite the precarious nature of this job. On the contrary, fixer is a daily wageworker who is paid each day and excluded from the right of demanding byline on news stories. The local journalists said that stringer is currently out of fashion and most of them are offered work as fixers in post-9/11 journalism. But their job as fixer, according to them, was never logistical, that is, arranging taxis or local hotel rooms for foreign media crew.

It was editorial, that is, sharing their occupational experience, ideas and journalistic expertise. Ironically, media-support organizations from Western countries send their experts to train the local journalists in Pakistan and all those whom I interviewed for this book said to have worked with global media—some of them reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan since the early 1970s and 1980s, but despite reporting professionally on an ongoing basis as trained journalists and developing a far more in-depth understanding of international journalism, none of them has been graduated up the chain to work on responsible international positions in global media. Because their skill set is mainly used for dealing with their ethnic cousins or negotiating their regional geographical limits, fixer is not a choice-work in Pakistan. Instead, it is a worrisome sign that warrants an assessment of a degrading value of the local organization of media labor in the global news market.

The nature of the local organization of media labor is highly hierarchical in Pakistan. Traditionally, local reporters work together as part of a countrywide news production system feeding news to a sprawling network of national TV channels and scores of newspapers. On a typical day, for instance, a local journalist in Peshawar, locally called a bureau reporter, might contact their cousins, called reporters, in surrounding settled and tribal districts for sharing information (See Map-1 in appendix). Because Peshawar is the local media center, the bureau reporters are not just better paid; they are also well connected with the mainstream national and international media grid. District reporters, on the contrary, are either low-paid or not even paid at all. However, they are the main source of free information on their respective areas, an invaluable oral archive used on a need basis. In the case of a bureau reporter or national journalist, who wants to file a story, for instance, on a natural calamity in the marginalized districts, he must seek the district reporters’ help. They approach the latter via bureau reporters. What the self-trained district journalists expect in return is not a payment in coin, but cooperation in kind. Availing future openings depends on a district reporter’s role in the bureau reporters’ network. As a cherished local tradition, this information-sharing method is locally justified on a spirit of solidarity, but existing behind the facade of this cultural exchange are traces of patron–client relationship. Based on an unequal pay and power structure, this unequal news authority has remained highly beneficial to sprawling national media in the country providing the latter dependable rural means of credible and timely information.

The emerging world of post-9/11 journalism, however, changed the situation. In 2001, roughly over four hundred international journalists representing global media outlets visited Pakistan to cover the US attack on al-Qaida’s hideouts across the border in Afghanistan. Peshawar became a hub of global media crew where they hired the bureau journalists to report on the expanding war from Afghanistan’s side. As the conflict prolonged to well over a decade or two, the relationship between the bureau and district reporters turned sour. Working as fixers, when the bureau reporters extracted free information from their colleagues in the surrounding restive districts, this reciprocal news-sharing practice was often abused. The bureau reporters not only took undue risks in pursuit of conflict-related news but also often left their district cousins at al-Qaida’s mercy without coming to their help in the case of some trouble. This emerging attitude gave birth to a hierarchical practice of news production, turning fixer into an entry point from where the corporate media transform local formation of global news relations. Because free information sharing was not possible any more, the bureau and district colleagues also could not maintain their traditional cooperation and solidarity. This created a culture of local resentment against the term fixer that the book examines in detail in later chapters.

The Fixer: Marx’s Proletarian

In post-9/11 journalism, the fixer has become a worldwide phenomenon. In 2014, not far from where I am writing this book, in St. Louis, Missouri, I came to know about hundreds of parachute journalists, backed by media corporations, that needed to hire fixers to help them in reporting on the Ferguson racial unrest following the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man fatally shot by a 28-year-old white police officer. The extensive coverage of this racial tension identified local reporters’ key role in the news operation of corporate media (Brigida, 2016). But connected with this renewed focus is the element of labor precariousness. Emerged out of a simultaneous process of centralization and decentralization, fixer represents how a few media giants in the capitalist North outsource the exploitative production of news around the world. A battery of fixers is gathered in conflict-riddled regions at the command of corporate media to produce news content, aid the celebrity TV anchors and foreign journalists, and then quickly disassemble as soon as the project is over. The fact that we have the same 24/7 commercial news across innumerable channels is an outcome of this less costly casual process of centralized decentralization: monopoly media outsourcing news production, hiring of low-cost local journalists for reporting on systemic forms of violence. Journalists who live closer to the visceral realities of conflict are not only de-professionalized into fixers, but their lives are also put at grave risk with lasting consequences.

In a UNESCO-circulated communiqué at a conference held in Helsinki on the Safety of Journalists in 2016, it was noted that attacks on journalists are well known, but less publicized is the fact that local journalists make up the bulk of those who are killed for doing journalism (UNESCO, 2016). The communiqué maintains: More than 700 journalists, media workers and social media producers who generate journalism have been killed during the past 10 years. According to another UNESCO report (2019), 93 percent out of the total 1,109 journalists killed in the line of duty were local journalists and 90 percent of these cases went unresolved, an indicator that almost perfect impunity exists in this regard. Another example is the Associated Press (AP), one of the major global wire services, which lost the largest number of journalists in the line of duty since