“Ashraf penetratingly explores the mesh of global journalistic hierarchies, capitalism and neo-imperialism in one of the world’s most dangerous war zones – the historically fractious Pashtun Belt straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan. Readers concerned with the politics of intellectual labor in war reporting should grasp this book for its fresh analyses and grounded information” — John D.H. Downing, Chief Editor, Sage Handbook of Media Studies.“Reporting from FATA-Afghanistan-Pakistan, the ground zero of news production today – where imperialism, capitalism, and religious fundamentalism collude to constantly displace people from their homes and lives – Syed Irfan Ashraf reveals how the ubiquitous ‘fixer’ is not just another professional category in journalism, but its nadir. From his own experience as a ‘fixer’, Ashraf shows how the global media capitalist machine literally feeds on the life and work of local journalists, mutilating them into its ‘eyes and ears’, and the terrible costs extracted in return for the fundamental human desire to be seen and heard; to speak back to an international public and not just be its victim or other. Thinking like Marx, Ashraf explains how the ‘fixer’ is a role, imposed by the process of the proletarianization; and its dehumanizing consequences, not only for journalists, but society as a whole — Jyotsna Kapur, Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, Southern Illinois University, US. The monograph, thanks to its empirical richness, is a valuable and unique contribution to the fast-growing volume of literature on fixers. The author, albeit briefly, looks into the previously unexplored intensity of fixers’ emotional experience. Their affective proximity to the events they cover made the local journalists’ labor more painful and traumatic but also motivated them, including the author himself, “to connect worries of the Pashtun community (...) to wider audiences to highlight the global violence” (p. 31). Ashraf vividly depicts the complexity of the conflict reporting ecosystem: the murky settings, the fabric of which is made by chains and nets of mutual exploitation—Mass Communication and SocietyThe Dark Side of News Fixing is a timely intervention that calls for a deeper understanding of the global structures that reduce local journalists to disembodied labourers while distorting their knowledge to sustain cycles of militarism in the Pashtun Belt. It contributes to postcolonial studies, borderlands theory, racial capitalism and journalism studies by interrogating the political economy of knowledge production in one of the world’s most militarised regions. —International Quarterly for Asian Studies
