The Dark Side of News Fixing provides a Pakistani journalist’s perspective on a four-decade-long regional contribution to global news production. The book describes how risky pursuits by “fixers” made it possible for Western media to access news developments in inaccessible and dangerous regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and led to unprecedented deaths of local reporters in the wider context of the so-called US-led “war on terror.” It analyses the fixer as a role in its relationship with militarisation. It is hardly a coincidence that fixers become valuable to commercial media only when violence or crises are at their peak.
Working under conditions of deprivation, scarcity or war, the value of the role of the fixer 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 the global market and the global war.
The Dark Side of News Fixing by Syed Irfan Ashraf serves as a vantage point from which one can clearly perceive the connection between regional con icts and commercial media, as well as local journalists’ transformation into daily wage-earners in the global shift toward neoliberalism.
