Translating and Interpreting Conflict - it's me

Jerry PalmerJournalists were aware that fixers might bring their own agendas to bearon the interactions that they made possible for the journalist, thus effectivelytransforming the journalist into a propagandist on their behalf; however,those who mentioned it did so primarily as a theoretical possibility ratherthan a real threat. Another possibility noted was that constant use of a singlefixer would lead to the fixer either intentionally or otherwise “forming thehorizon” of the journalist through a consistent pattern of interpretation ofevents and of contacts with the local population. One UK journalist said hepreferred not to use them for this reason, but nevertheless acknowledged theimportance of the fixer's contacts. It is a particular risk in a context where thesecurity situation is so dangerous that the journalist depends upon the fixerfor an assessment of the possibility of actually being in a particular place.Several journalists reported having to lean on their fixers not to beexcessively timid in their security assessments - in one case, this amounted torefusing to accept the assessment and spending four days trying to find a gapin the US military encirclement of Najaf at the height of the confrontationswith the “Mahdi Army” of Moqtada Al Sadr in the summer of 2004 (witheventual success).Clearly the risk of the fixer forming the journalist is the obverse of theadvantage of the fixer having a network of local contacts: this access isstructured by the fixer's own identity. At one level, this may take the form ofthe relatively inaccessible nature of particular parts of Iraq for individualfixers due to their religious identity, in particular Sunni versus Shia. Severaljournalists said that a Sunni fixer could not get into Shia areas (and viceversa),but others asserted that this was far from the norm. One Frenchjournalist argued that the legacy of the Ba'ath party included a section ofIraqi society which was broadly secular and nationalist in outlook, andtherefore relatively immune to religious intolerance; however, it should beremembered that the French journalists in my sample had fixers withrelatively formalised and extensive contacts with the previous regime, andwho would therefore have had access to precisely the section of Iraqi societyin question; whether the same would be true under other circumstances isopen to question. Several journalists queried the centrality of the religiousdivide, arguing that tribal affiliation and local contacts were much moreimportant; these journalists had examples of fixers being able to cross thereligious divides without difficulty. The ability or willingness of fixers tocross such boundaries would influence the range of contacts available to thejournalist; however, journalists working for major broadcasting organisationshad several fixers.At another level, it is less a question of the direct effect of contacts,accessibility, etc., and more a question of outlook: the place the fixeroccupies in social networks is clearly influential in forming their own view ofthe world, and this may be presumed to play into the way in which they22