Part III - Moral Worlds of Ambivalence and Bias

Summary

Part III considers fixers as moral actors caught between competing expectations from local interests on the one hand and foreign reporters on the other. In the context of growing acrimony against the foreign press in Turkey and the outright murder or abduction of numerous journalists in Syria, these chapters show how fixers reconcile or circumvent conflicts in the relationships they broker, and how they save face when conflict cannot be avoided. Stories of newsmaking on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and on the collapse of peace in Kurdish regions of both Turkey and Syria in 2014–2015 demonstrate how fixers tap into expansive social networks to matchmake compatible source–reporter pairs, establish forms of reciprocity with sources that are invisible to their clients, and evade the attention of violent state and non-state actors, all with mixed success. When they fail, fixers lose clients or sources, status or trust. When they succeed, fixers create trading zones in which knowledge can be exchanged across political and cultural divides.