Lost in Translation

This study examines the war-reporting industry’s attitude toward news “fixers”—the locally based contacts who become news employees, by helping foreign reporters translate interviews, build contacts, and navigate the cultural contexts with which correspondents are increasingly unfamiliar in the era of “parachute journalism.” Conducting a critical discourse analysis of 189 articles published in English-language journalism trade publications, the study seeks to answer these research questions: (1) How do Anglophone editors and reporters understand and value the labor of news fixers working in conflict zones? (2) How do Anglophone editors and reporters discuss the safety of their news fixers? Drawing upon the critical frameworks found in the field of global media ethics, the study will suggest that news fixers have the potential to facilitate more complex and productive “global–local exchanges,” which could in turn lead to a global media ethics that is, in the words of Wasserman, “truly dialogic and critical.” Yet, despite the valuable cultural perspective that fixers can bring, a critical discourse analysis shows that these media employees are currently undervalued and underprotected by the editors and correspondents who hire them.