On December 22, 2009, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside the main entrance of the Peshawar Press Club (PPC), killing 3 people and injuring 23 others. Over forty journalists were inside the building at the time of attack, but the teenage bomber could not reach the target. The club's security guard who intercepted the attacker was killed in the explosion. This was the first attack of this kind against journalists in Pakistan, but not the last.

Following al-Qaida's relocation in the Pashtun Belt, over forty Pashtun journalists were killed in Pakistan. Three press clubs were bombed in the tribal areas. There is at least one press club in each of Pakistan's districts where journalists meet, socialize and rent out space for press conferences. But almost every journalist felt threatened. Militarized violence is much more prevalent in the troubled Pashtun Belt than in the rest of the country. Because of their journalistic work, some even have lost their family members. This shows that the local reporters’ challenges in 24/7 news routines were no longer just an issue of labor exploitation, the relations of news production and official manipulation. This news cycle also put the local reporters’ lives at stake, especially in Pakistan's Pashtun Belt.

After the year 2002, the ongoing “war on terror” coincided with the national airwaves privatization, resulting in an electronic media boom in Pakistan. Working in the eye of the storm, the local journalists were caught between the demands of 24/7 media and the warring parties’ dictates fighting for control over the conflict zone. The sprawling media scene in Pakistan adopted the individualized risk-taking model of privatized capitalist media, which promoted a neoliberal logic: one gets what one deserves. Risks were transferred onto workers and their families in the way a neoliberal logic categorizes violence as a sporadic local outcome, disconnecting it from global capital (Standing, 2011, p. 1). Because each faction steering the conflict could kill these journalists with impunity, I call them sovereign nodes, that is, the Pakistan military, al-Qaida-led Taliban groups and the United States

Using the intersection of the military, militants and the media as a lens, this chapter examines how local reporters work under the neoliberal logic and in what ways they are confronting violence in reporting for Pakistani and global media.