When a news contributor’s social and moral link to the field of international journalism tightens, they gain greater frame control, more moral sway to change their foreign colleagues’ minds. Yet at the same time, the moral drive to challenge those foreign colleagues with frame-breaking information and the capacity to access fresh perspectives weaken as that contributor’s dispositions, social network, and field of vision align with their foreign teammates’. We might call this the Producer’s Paradox, the flip side of the Fixer’s Paradox.

In 2016, I expanded my research methods from interviewing and observing reporters and fixers to working in both roles myself.1 Becoming a freelance reporter was as simple as pitching a story idea to a news outlet and hiring one of the fixers I knew to help me. I recruited multiple fixers for each story I reported so that I could compare how a change of brokers might lead me in a different direction. This was a luxury few reporters can afford. I was lucky to have my journalism subsidized by research funds from Columbia University and the National Science Foundation, because I lost money on every story I wrote.

Late in the evening of Friday, July 15, 2016, I was at home in Etiler neighborhood idly browsing social media while my then-girlfriend-now-wife Brett rehearsed music when strange reports started to appear in my Twitter feed. Military vehicles had blocked off bridges connecting Istanbul’s European and Anatolian sides; soldiers were on the street telling people to go home, that it was not a drill. Turkish Twitter was collectively realizing that a coup d’état was underway. Soldiers appeared in Taksim Square and at Istanbul airport.

Urban warfare raged across Turkey’s southeast in early 2016 as security forces recaptured city centers from the PKK’s youth wing. As the death toll mounted, it struck me as odd that foreign news reports about the conflict were still using the same estimate for the total death toll of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict – approximately 40,000 – that had appeared a decade earlier when I first started to follow the issue. I decided to write an article about where the estimate came from and why it seemed stuck at 40,000.

Aziz’s abduction in Aleppo made the couple more guarded and suspicious about working with the foreign press. The international community’s response was a harsh reminder of their marginal status in journalism. Foreign reporters who reached out to Leyla while Aziz sat in a Jabhat al-Nusra prison cell probed whether Aziz had conspired in his clients’ kidnapping. Those clients’ governments did nothing, as far as the couple could tell, to secure Aziz’s release when they negotiated ransoms for their own citizens.

Nur worked nonstop with reporters in the southeast throughout 2015 and 2016 on the refugee crisis, the collapsing Kurdish peace process, and legal attacks on the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) that the government opportunistically redoubled after July 15th. The party had nothing to do with the coup attempt, but the government ramped up plans already under way to prosecute HDP lawmakers under anti-terrorism laws. Erdoğan used state of emergency powers to replace democratically elected HDP mayors with state-appointed “trustees,” much as his prosecutors had forced opposition media outlets into trusteeship.

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.

The role of the intermediary bridging disparate worlds is not new. Centuries before fixers mediated between journalists and sources, dragoman diplomats (from tercüman: translator) mediated between European states and Ottoman sultans (Lewis 2004). Oft-stigmatized “middleman minorities” and “edge people” have long found themselves in the role of bridges between worlds: Christians in the Middle East (most dragomans were ethnic Greeks), Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Jews in Europe, mixed-race people in colonial settings, upwardly mobile members of marginalized communities, immigrants and refugees everywhere (Bonacich 1973; Ong 1999; Lewis 2004; Pattillo 2007: 113–147; Yannakakis 2008; Judt 2010).

Part I is about the social origins of people who became fixers in 2010s Turkey and Syria. Some were refugees from Syria’s civil war or journalists ousted from Turkey’s domestic press as the Turkish state successively captured opposition outlets; these prospective fixers turned to work with the international media for the promise of stability. Others came from non-journalism backgrounds but, inspired by developments such as Turkey’s “Kurdish Opening” or the 2013 Gezi Park protest movement, found in fixing the opportunity to pursue adventurous and idealistic aspirations. Fixers of different backgrounds help foreign reporters in different ways: some provide insider access to local events and people, while others help their clients to make sense of phenomena from an outsider perspective.

Story frames are always tacit, and who is handed the tacit authority to fill which tacit blanks is a matter of status within journalism. At each descending level of journalism’s hierarchy and each successive link along the chain of information brokerage, from editor to reporter to fixer, the remaining blank frame spaces become narrower, less abstract, and more firmly prescribed by the scripts that surround them.

Part V presents an overview of different fixers’ career trajectories in the larger context of the international news economy and shifting meta-narratives about Turkey and Syria. Fixers find opportunities to contribute to the news behind the scenes, even as their counterparts in the domestic Turkish media face political and economic hardship, and even as Syria has become an inhospitable environment for journalists. Many fixers nonetheless find it difficult to challenge dominant narratives imposed by foreign reporters and news organizations, and so end up moving on to different pursuits. Turnover of both fixers and foreign reporters is continual and counterintuitively contributes to the stability of the system of international news production. The book concludes with a discussion of emergent forms of social media–based information brokerage in newsmaking in comparison with the longer-standing tradition of local fixers assisting foreign reporters.

In 2003, Istanbul Pride became the first LGBT parade in a Muslim-majority country. Every subsequent year turnout swelled. Around 100,000 people marched from Taksim Square down İstiklal Boulevard in 2014. In 2015, though, police attacked and dispersed revelers with water cannons and rubber bullets (Knight 2015). In June 2016, a month before the coup attempt, Grey Wolves joined Islamists in threatening to attack marchers, and Istanbul’s governor banned the event on grounds of security concerns, establishing a precedent that the governorate would follow in subsequent years (AP 2016). Some defied the ban, and riot police responded with more rubber bullets.

Karim and Habib each carved out influential positions for themselves in emergent fields, trading zones between various international actors and the Syrians and Afghans of concern to them (Collins et al. 2010; Galison 2010).1

The world is disorderly and dangerous, at least to an outsider. But cultures and professions impose order on their corners of the world, providing insiders with classification systems, explanations, and rituals to make sense of things (Abbott 1981; Zelizer 1993). Max Weber ([1918] 1946a), a founding father of sociology, used the term disenchantment for the domestication and rationalization of the previously mysterious and magical. A disenchanted world is orderly, predictable, safe, pure, and boring.

When we assess risk and weigh moral pressures, we reference (consciously or not) time maps that chart our remembered past and predicted future (Snyder 2016: 15–17). When we consider ourselves ahead or behind on a known path based on a narrative of success that we share with our peers, we are tracing our movement through a time map. When a company standardizes a career trajectory, promising employees a path from entry level to seniority with standard salary increases and pension contributions along the way, it creates a time map for those employees. That map aligns employees to the company’s moral world by making their long-term relationship with it predictable.

The same year that Habib graduated from university, and a year before Karim fled Syria for Turkey, an invigorated opposition movement shook up Turkish politics. Environmentalists occupied Istanbul’s Gezi Park in late May 2013 to protest municipal plans to replace the park next to central Taksim Square with a shopping mall. The main construction contractor was a conglomerate that would soon acquire Orhan’s former newspaper Sabah as it was passed around from one pro-government businessman to the next. Prime Minister Erdoğan was a witness at the owner’s wedding (RSF and bianet 2016).

Fixers are not always ambivalent. Sometimes one side of the triad holds greater sway over the broker, who is accordingly biased in their favor. That sway may be strengthened by one brokered party’s threat of immediate sticks or promise of immediate carrots to the fixer. Or a fixer’s allegiance may be swayed because of the longer-term alignment of their dispositions with either reporter or source, based on the fixer’s socialization and aspirations for the future.