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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

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Summary

The bright brown eyes of a young girl popped from the large computer screen on an editing console. Walking by the desk of my journalist colleague, I stopped to take a look at the edit; a report sent from a violent conflict zone of Pakistan was being translated into English for that night's news bulletin. The girl spoke with a shaky voice. “I am very frightened,” she said crisply. “Our siblings are terrified, and we cannot come to school.” She spoke an Urdu of startling refinement for a rural Pashtun child. “Who is that mashoma (a girl child)?” I asked my news colleague. “Malala,” he replied nonchalantly (Brenner, 2013). A year later in 2009, a local BBC reporter saw in Malala an Anne Frank, a diarist of Jewish origin who narrated her ordeal before she was sent to a concentration camp during the Second World War. At the same time, the New York Times (NYT) hired me as “fixer” to make a documentary on her struggle. “If there were no BBC, no New York Times and no channels,” Malala once said, “then my voice would not have reached the people” (BBC Urdu, 2012). Mostly carried out by local reporters, the global media coverage projected the mashoma as a symbol of defiance against the Taliban, which led the latter to shoot her in the head in 2012. Luckily, the mashoma survived. Her unrelenting defiance even led her to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Ever since, Malala lives in self-exile in England along with her family. Was the pre-teen Malala's defiance equivalent to “informed consent”? Was the mashoma capable of assessing the threat that the video could pose to her life? Did the corporate media commodify the child's defiant image for revenue and ratings? All these questions are still being raised in the context of the “war on terror” in Pakistan. While I will share my detailed reflections on these questions in the next chapter, what gets ignored here is the journalists’ role as “fixers.” This chapter will establish a relationship between war and journalism. This inquiry is crucial in the contemporary context of post-US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has also left the bordering regions of Pakistan in deep chaos.

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Chapter
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The Dark Side of News Fixing
The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan
, pp. 1 - 16
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2021

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