Part IV - Translations

Summary

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.