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.

Orhan, the metalci former national newspaper reporter, covered the Soma mine accident with an American news site. He was established in the fixing game by then and had developed routines for finding sources even when he lacked direct personal contacts. Instead of, like Elif, driving to the site first and hoping to meet the right victim once he arrived, Orhan monitored the Turkish media, skimming every story reported on location. He found an article mentioning an Alevi village that had lost more than a dozen men in the disaster, many of them related. Erdoğan and the governing AKP, with their increasingly sectarian Sunni Muslim identity politics, had a contentious relationship with the country’s Alevi religious minority, and Orhan knew his clients would bite at a story framed by not just sadness but also oppression.1 And with so many dead, they would find someone willing to talk.

I first heard of fixers when I participated in the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul in summer 2010, fresh out of college. Each student had to pursue their own photo stories over the course of a week, and workshop organizers provided us with a list of local fixers. Though I had taken undergraduate courses on international journalism, I had only the vaguest of ideas about what I was supposed to ask of the people on the list.

When Orhan first started fixing, he coached clients that Turkish opposition journalism was under siege, that Ergenekon and Sledgehammer coup plot trials were a sham, that Erdoğan was an authoritarian amassing power. They mostly dismissed Orhan as an embittered Kemalist. In their view, the big picture was that AK Party was democratizing Turkey, integrating the country into Europe, and performing an economic miracle.

For Elif, a police interrogation was a frightening new experience. But Nur and other Kurdish fixers in the southeast considered state security forces as a fourth party ever in the background of their interactions with reporters and sources. No mere dyad or triad but a tetrad of fraught relations complicated Nur’s moral world.

Part IV centers on the flow of information that becomes news stories. Close analyses of source–fixer–reporter interactions that informed reports on the Turkish government’s crackdown on domestic critics and on the country’s July 2016 coup attempt show, concretely, how fixers transform the information that passes through them from source to reporter. From the ways they prepare reporters for interviews to the words they choose when interpreting between Turkish and English, fixers cannot help but shape reporters’ perceptions and so the news. Fixers nonetheless operate within the tight constraints of news organizations’ framings of events and templates for coverage. Fixers’ interventions into information transmission are patterned by socially constructed but idiosyncratic moral considerations: their personal and political aspirations, as well as their desire to harmonize emergent conflicts between the parties they broker.

Conflict between the respective interests of journalists and locals is clearest when people on whom journalists want to report would rather kill or ransom them. Between 2012 and 2014, numerous journalists were targeted by militants in Syria. Some ended up in ISIS custody. Initially, there was a blackout on media coverage of these abductions, in a later-controversial consensus that reportage could compromise negotiations for release. But in 2014, ISIS released beheading videos of freelance reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff, which made headlines around the world (Simon 2014).

I hired Orhan to help me for the same story about the crackdown on the Turkish press. The newsworthy peg on which I thought I could hang the story was the recent seizure of Zaman. When I discussed my idea with Orhan at his usual café, he did not suggest any pro-Gülen media sources. He instead encouraged me to contextualize recent events with the Gülen Movement’s history of collusion with the government in targeting critical journalists.