In this installment of Media at Risk, Dr Noah Amir Arjomand discusses his work on fixers and local journalists in Mexico, Turkey and Syria. Combining personal anecdotes with core considerations about the state of global news production in high-risk and rapidly changing media landscapes, Noah provides an overview of how fixers are simultaneously central figures in journalistic practice and the continued subjects of exclusion and exploitation. Joined by Annenberg doctoral student Anna Murphy, the two chat about Noah’s 2022 work of sociological fiction, Fixing Stores: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria, as well as his role in an upcoming documentary about fixers and coverage of the cartel in Mexico.
Dr. Noah Amir Arjomand is a filmmaker and media scholar. His first feature film, Eat Your Catfish, won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. Cambridge University Press published Noah’s book Fixing Stores: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria, in 2022. Foreign Affairs then named it among the best books of the year. Noah holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia University, an MFA in screenwriting from the University of California in Riverside, and a bachelor’s in public and international affairs from Princeton University. He was previously a postdoctoral scholar in global media, development and democracy at Indiana University in Bloomington and the Center for International Media Assistance, and is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Media & Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. Noah is producing a feature documentary about fixers in Mexico with fellow Emmy-winning director Ora DeKornfeld.
Anna Murphy is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the steering committee for the Center for Media at Risk and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. Anna is chiefly interested in cultural and critical political economy approaches to global news production. She is also the co-organizer of the Philly Cinematheque, a space dedicated to multimodal scholarship and community formation through film.
Music Credit: Royalty Free Music by Diffie Bosman
Transcript:
Anna: Welcome to Media at Risk, a podcast presented by the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Anna Murphy, and I am a doctoral student here at Annenberg. I am also a member of the steering committee for the Center for Media at Risk and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication.
Today, I will be speaking with Dr. Noah Amir Arjomand. Noah is a filmmaker and a media scholar. His first feature film, Eat Your Catfish, won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. In 2022, Cambridge University Press published Noah’s book Fixing Stories: Local News Making and International Media in Turkey and Syria. Foreign Affairs later named it among the best books of the year.
Noah holds a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of California, Riverside and a Bachelor’s degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. He was previously a postdoctoral scholar in global media development and democracy at Indiana University Bloomington and the Center for International Media Assistance. He is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside.
Noah is also currently producing a feature documentary about fixers in Mexico with fellow Emmy-winning director Ora DeKornfeld. I initially reached out to Noah after reading his book with the intention of hearing more about local news making and fixers in Turkey and Syria. When we started chatting, however, I also learned about the current documentary project he is part of. So today we are going to talk about both, and about local news contributors’ understandings of labor, risk and global news production more broadly. Hi Noah, thank you for being here.
Noah: Hi, thanks so much for having me. It is a pleasure to be speaking with you.
Anna: Absolutely. So, I want to start by asking you to give a brief introduction to “fixers,” which I know is a somewhat loaded term in and of itself. Who are they? What roles do fixers typically play within what we understand as journalism and global news production?
Noah: Fixers are local guides, interpreters or intermediaries. I define them as information brokers or cultural mediators who assist foreign journalists and foreign news organizations with local reporting. They are the brokers between client journalists and local sources.
Whether they are called fixers or not, they are more or less ubiquitous in cross-cultural reporting of all kinds. This can be international reporting, or reporting within a country where there are different cultures and subcultures and you need somebody to help you access or make sense of local realities. So, you might be working with someone you call a local producer, a line producer or a colleague at a local publication — whatever it might be.
What I am really interested in, though, is the role of being in between. It is the fixing itself that interests me. What does it take to secure access to people who may not want to talk to the press or who might have a negative perception of the media? What does it take to make sense of local events in a way where meaning crosses these gaps in perception and language, both literal and metaphorical, in how people make sense of the world? As you mentioned, the term fixer is controversial and I’m happy to talk about that as well.
Anna: Yes, it would be helpful if we could jump right in and unpack some of the nuances of the term and where those nuances come from.
Noah: Sure. Fixer can be a dirty word. It carries certain connotations. I trace the etymology of the term back to the early twentieth century, when it wasn’t used in journalism. Fixers originally were go-betweens between criminal society and the “straight” world. They might fence stolen goods or give bribes to politicians. There was a sense of the intermediary, of people operating in the shadows and that sense has carried over somewhat. It contributes to the sketchiness that many people associate with the term.
It was much more recently, over the last few decades, that fixer entered journalism. For many people today, it is a signal of inequality within the field and of coloniality. Often you have white North American or Western European journalists parachuting into an “exotic locale” around the world. They hire a fixer who does a great deal of the legwork and interpretive work for them. Often, as we will maybe get into a bit more, sometimes even the work of interviewing people is delegated to the fixer. Yet, the outsider journalist gets the byline, the recognition and the awards, while the fixer, who does a lot of the same work, remains in a subordinated position.
So that is the critique of the term. I kept it, even in the title of my book, or at least the word fixing, because I think it is important to think about these labels and how they are meaningful to participants in international news making. What does it mean when someone calls themselves, or is labeled, a fixer rather than an interpreter or producer?
What I found is that while fixer is not at the top of the professional hierarchy of journalism, it is still a role many people adopt themselves. In some cases, it carries more professional recognition than being seen as a local activist who helps journalists make contact with sources, or as a driver or interpreter, even though a fixer may do interpreting and driving as well.
So, I see the label as contested. It can have both value and stigma within the ecosystem of international news making.
Anna: So, taking a step back, I wonder about your own introduction to fixers, local journalists and producers more broadly. How did these individuals become a research focus for you? And why did you choose to center your initial research around Turkey and Syria?
Noah: Sure. I did not know what a fixer was when I was taking undergraduate journalism classes, including classes on international reporting. It was not something that really came up. The first time I worked with a fixer was in 2010 in Istanbul. I took a photojournalism workshop, and each of us had the opportunity to work with a fixer whom the program had lined up.
I did not know what a fixer was or what you were supposed to ask these people to do. It turned out that my fixer was actually a political science student about the same age as me, who later went on to get a PhD in the United States. So, my first introduction to fixers was to people who often have expert knowledge, are on their own trajectories of upward or international mobility, and who are doing far more than simply opening doors.
In that case, I was doing a photography project about a neighborhood in Istanbul called Tarlabaşı, which was subject to this so-called urban renewal project. Many longtime residents were being pushed out of the neighborhood in various ways.
The fixer I collaborated with had much better questions to ask than I did. It felt like a really interesting partnership: to have these teams of someone with insider knowledge, who knows a lot of what is going on locally, with someone viewing things through an outside lens. That outside lens can be an objectifying one in a bad way, but it can also be essential in reaching audiences who might not know or care about the topic. And for somebody who is very much used to this world, say they are studying urban politics in Turkey, it might be useful for them to collaborate with an outsider to get a sense of how we make somebody who does not already know about this topic, care.
So, there is a broader challenge here for knowledgeable people, whether scientists, experts in whatever field or journalists, about how to communicate their expertise to the outside world.
Anna: That makes complete sense. Continuing with the focus on Turkey, your book centers on Istanbul and Diyarbakır as two hubs, or at least two locations that you focus on. Can you talk about those two spaces and how the role of fixers as these intercultural intermediaries differed based on locations and actors within these cities? Why did you choose to focus on those two places for your book?
Noah: Yes. Things look very different for fixers depending on whether they are in a major urban metropolis, a hub for journalism where many international journalists are based, or in the “provinces” where there are few journalists. At the time that I was there, I think there was one Dutch journalist who was based in Diyarbakır. She was the only international correspondent, and she was deported while I was doing my research.
In Istanbul there were many more fixers and a wider variety of stories being reported. I also found that relationships between client journalists and fixers were almost of mutual apprenticeship, where things were not just one-off transactions or extraction of information. Instead, it was often the case that there would be people collaborating for years. Outsider reporter clients became more familiar with local contexts and learned from their fixer partners, while fixers learned more about how international journalism works, often in very practical ways. Like how you do a satellite link for television, for example. For another example, one Turkish producer described the difference between being a fixer and being a producer as the ability to imagine how an audience member somewhere like Arkansas might view the news, as somebody who does not know or care anything about Turkey. What is a story that you could sell to the news network that they would think, okay, even somebody — not the pick on Arkansas — even somebody in Arkansas would be interested.
But that was what my research partner was saying: she was always going back to the imaginary Arkansas viewer. I think for her and for a lot of people, getting that knowledge how to see their society through outside eyes really came out of these long-term relationships with clients.
In Diyarbakır, by contrast, things looked quite different. Diyarbakır functioned a bit more like Afghanistan, in the sense that people went to Diyarbakır to report on specific stories, primarily about the Kurdish issue or the Kurdish conflict, and then left. Overwhelmingly, the journalists who I met in Diyarbakır were working on the same type of story over and over again, and their relationships with client journalists tended to be a bit more like one-off transactions where a journalist would come in, maybe for a few days, and want to pack those days full of as many different stories as possible. Then, they would leave. So, in a way, if we think about fixers as straddling difference fields or different subcultures, there are the fields of international journalism and local society. In this case, the fixers’ ties with international journalists were much weaker than their ties with loca powerbrokers of all kinds.
Now, this meant that, in effect, the fixers were trusted in Diyarbakır much less than fixers with whom clients had longer-term relationships, who really developed trust. So, often journalists would come into Diyarbakır with more set expectations, like “here is my checklist; help me get this done. I am not interested in your perspective because I assume you are just going to be biased. You are going to be part of the pro-Kurdish movement.” Fixers get treated a bit more like activists who are helping that a “real” colleague with whom the journalist is having a mutual exchange. So, what I found in Diyarbakır I suspect is the case in a lot of places where journalists are coming in for short amounts of time, just to report a story, rather than in places where fixers and journalists have time to rub elbows for a long time. What I saw in Diyarbakır was that people often got stuck at the fixer level; they were not trusted as producers or real contributors in news production. They were not invited to brainstorm or frame stories overall. They often had more difficulty convincing client journalists of things that they did not already believe. In Istanbul, you really saw those long-term relationships.
Anna: I want to bring in your current project here. You are now looking at similar roles within global news production but in a very different geopolitical context. Could you talk about how those different material conditions have shaped your observation on both the roles of fixers and the identities of the people who typically perform these roles?
Noah: Sure. The project I am currently working on — and I should say that I was not the originator of it — is about fixers in Mexico. I came on board because I was introduced to the director, Ora DeKornfeld, who had already begun filming. I joined the team as a producer. Ora is based in Mexico and working on the documentary about fixers in Mexico, particularly those working with journalists reporting on the drug war.
I do see some similarities between the two sites, among other things, due to the precarity and dangers of these positions. Of journalists being targeted in different ways, especially in Syria to deadly effects. In Turkey, repression has frequently taken legal forms more than assassinations, although that has also happened. In Mexico journalists have to worry about the cartel, or organized crime, but also about state violence.
I have also seen some parallels in terms of the importance, but also the risks of, being that intermediary between worlds. In Mexico, they are often contending with the stereotypes and assumptions that journalists bring with them to the field. In Turkey and Syria, it was often this set of Orientalist stereotypes, which I suppose have parallels in Mexico in terms of ideas about development and people’s relationship to violence. Every journalist that comes to Mexico is bringing a certain amount of baggage in one way or another, and that baggage falls to fixers.
Fixers choose to either cater to these fantasies, to be a kind of wish or fantasy filler, or even a kind of set designer in journalism. Or, they can decide to push back against the fantasies, but fixers often feel like they do not have the power to do so. have to decide whether to challenge those assumptions or accommodate them. If they push back, they might be shut out or even not hired again. So, in the case of Mexico, and particularly with the chief protagonist that the film follows, there are scenes where a French journalist comes and want to report on the cartels. He is saying, “I have a vision of pickup trucks, dust in the background and we see the desert. And as they get close, we see that they are call carrying AK-47s”. In this instance, it falls to the fixer to make this happen. So, with coded language, the fixer would call his contact at the cartel and say that they need a certain number of “toys” or automatic rifles. He will suggest a cinematic spot to meet. So, doing the work of translating between international expectations and local realities, even at this visual level, is something that we see happening with this documentary, but it also echoes what I saw in Turkey in my research.
Anna: Absolutely. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there is an interesting tension here between what you have mentioned just now and a broader theme around the purposes of journalism and how to navigate conveying truth, storytelling, enjoyment or appeal and these very serious subjects all at the same time. Do you see these conversations playing out at micro-levels, both within your own book and your current role in the documentary/ How has your research revealed different components of these conversations around the purposes of journalism?
Noah: I think there has always been this idea of journalism being a part of a media entertainment sphere. I will say — so to the extent to which I have talked about fixers as being pulled between different worlds — I do think that their clients are equally experiencing that. They might have a certain allegiance, or they got into journalism to be truth tellers to power, but now they have a job and they report to a multinational conglomerate that sees their work as generic content that is designed to get clicks. The journalists are also having to reconcile their ambivalence, or perhaps to reconcile their loyalty to those whom they are interviewing with the expectations of entertaining or being sensationalist. All the different gatekeepers along the chain of production are to different extents experiencing these competing pulls. In the case of the protagonist in Mexico, I think he sees himself as being part of the entertainment industry. He is trying to actually get out of the fixing game as much as possible because it is so dangerous, and he has a young child, but also because he wants to direct horror movies.
It is also generally the case that for a lot of people who are doing this work of fixing, it is seen as a temporary job, or a way to subsidize some other work that they do. This might be work in other fields of entertainment, which in turn might shape the way that they go about their work as fixers. It might also be the case that these fixers also work as local journalists. This was true in Mexico and was also the case for many folks that I got to know in Turkey. Often, they will work for local publications in Turkey, authoring articles under their own names, but then also working as a fixer. The fixing work is viewed as a way to get paid for a day or two’s work with as much as a month’s worth of work for a local publication. So, they may see it as still exercising their “truth to power muscle” through their local work that makes very little money and is for a Turkish website that is too small for the government to bother to shut down. But in their work for the international media, they can take a certain kind of blasé stance or distance from it. They will do what the clients ask them to. If they come with an Orientalist fantasy, they will help them to realize it. They will compartmentalize that side of them from the part that actually got them into journalism, that same part that got them fired from successive Turkish newspapers for exercising. The fixing it the subsidy or job security to allow them to keep doing that.
Anna: I would like to end by asking about the future. It is not a new observation, but standard operating models for global news production change seemingly continuously. From your work, what trends and challenges do you see for fixers and local contributors to global journalism? What do local journalists seem chiefly concerned about? And what is maybe not being prioritized in the need to address and protect these contributors to local journalism?
Noah: One this that is always changing is the division of labor between human and non-humans in media production and the ways in which technologies are being used. For example, when I talk to people who worked as fixers in Iraqi Kurdistan during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a lot of their jobs as fixers entailed physically transporting film from cameras or knowing where the nearest telex machine was so journalists could file their stories. Now, these components of the fixer job are being outsourced to technology and communications technology is much more ubiquitous. Everybody has access to email to file stories, send footage or audiotapes. I think it is useful to think about how things have changed leading up to this point in terms of what is considered to be human work, and what is considered to be non-human work. That is very much in flux right now. One trend I see — and this goes along with changes in global media in terms of budgets being cut, foreign bureaus being shut down and freelancers being relied on to cover ever-vaster geographic areas — is that the division is labor between human and non-human fixers is changing not-necessarily-for-the-better when it comes to challenging preconceptions or assumption of foreign journalists. Now, when you are using sycophantic AI to vet your story, as opposed to someone who might have a different world view from you, you might not be challenged in the right ways.
Anna: That makes complete sense. While not entirely pessimistic, it certainly paints a complex picture for the future. Well, I think we are out of time, but this was wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and to share insights about your work.
Noah: Thank you so much. It was great talking with you.
Anna: And this concludes this installment of Media at Risk. Thank you to the Center for Media at Risk, to Noah once again and to the Media Lab here at Annenberg. Goodbye.
