Safeguarding the Journalist

Abstract

The chapter explores the labor of safeguarding the journalist. Fixers represent themselves as playing a vital role in keeping foreign reporters out of harm’s way, most especially when these reporters’ status as racial, national, and even gendered Others might put them at risk. Sometimes the fixer must speak on behalf of the journalist, smoothing things over with a suspicious police officer or an angry crowd. Other times, the fixer might give the journalist advice on how to safely navigate the complex sociocultural landscape, imploring female journalists to dress conservatively in certain areas, and recommending certain neighborhoods that no foreign reporter should visit alone. For these reasons, news outlets tend to conceptualize fixers as a key element of the security measures they must take to keep their journalists safe in the field. Yet, the chapter closes by showing the flip side of this labor—the possibility that the news fixers themselves will be injured or killed. Notwithstanding this danger, news organizations rarely provide their fixers with safety equipment, hazardous environment training, or medical insurance.