Baghdad bureaux: an exploration of the interconnected world of fixers and correspondents at the BBC and CNN

Post-war Iraq is so dangerous that Western television correspondents have been forced to change their modus operandi and rely more heavily on locally-hired fixers. This article asks if the virtual absence of overseas reporters from Iraq’s streets has led to a less authentic newsgathering role. Conversely, it may have delivered a more nuanced form of editorial and logistical task-sharing. Thisresearch draws on interviews from 2007 and 2008 with twenty foreign correspondents, two senior news managers and five fixers. It employs Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital as a framework to examine the exchange of forms of power and expertise between the players. Where trust is now at the forefront of this news gathering relationship, this research deconstructs the methods by which fixers are recruited and deployed. A comparison is made between the production techniques of foreign correspondents who employ fixers for short-term purposes and correspondents from the BBC and CNN.

Sample

News gathering in Iraq in recent years has challenged foreign correspondents as never before. How can you report on life in a country when the streets are a virtual no-go zone? And while there is still disagreement about whether Iraq represents some kind of a watershed in terms of danger for journalists, or simply constitutes another rung in a ladder of violence, what is not under dispute is the death toll. According to the International Federation of Journalists, ‘Iraq remains the world’s deadliest country for journalists and media staff’ with 284 deaths recorded since the American-led invasion of 2003 (White, 2009: 2). This bald fact has led to major changes in the news production behaviour of journalists as they go about the day-to-day business of covering the story.

Main Findings

The unique working conditions of the BBC and CNN’s Baghdad bureaux mean that the personnel on the ground have a great deal of autonomy in decision-making, and are free from constant oversight by London or Atlanta. Instead, their constraints are those of the street – the danger, the hassle and the problems of filming. The bureaux staff, comprising Western and local media personnel are compelled to trust much more in teamwork to arrive at decisions. On the Baghdad streets, the correspondents would be blind without their fixers’ ‘eyes and ears’. This is shown by the ways in which the BBC has re-badged the local fixers as ‘producers’, has employed them long term, has invested in editorial and safety training for them and has moved some of them on to other jobs and bureaux. In a similar way, at CNN, fixers are also employed long term, their families are taken care of, their work is acknowledged within the organization and they are promoted and moved to other bureaux as well. In comparison to their Baghdad counterparts, fixers elsewhere are only employed on short-term, ad-hoc, word of mouth contracts. This shift in power towards the fixers in Iraq means that they have more ‘embodied capital’ as they hold the keys to the streets and they gain further journalistic skills and training through the ongoing process of long-term work. The fact that they know more about what is going on in the streets and have local knowledge of the security situation means that they are ‘de facto journalists’. This will make them more employable in the news business, either through shifting to the company’s other bureaux or by becoming correspondents themselves with other organisations.