This article examines the role of the fixer in international news production, particularly war reportage, and reorients an ongoing debate about the role of local media-workers in foreign bureaus. While the institutional conditions of fixing have received some scholarly attention, the epistemic dimension of fixers’ labour yet requires critical examination. Utilizing eighteen months of participant observation and qualitative interviews with fixers and foreign journalists in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, I demonstrate that the local, ‘situated’ knowledge of fixers is both structural to, and ultimately suppressed by, the global, ‘professional’ knowledge of international news. This tension is evident in the routines of war reportage – gathering information, navigating checkpoints – and in journalism’s generic conventions, as where the byline – mark of professional authorship – establishes a hierarchy regarding what counts as authoritative meanings for war. In resituating analysis of fixing from the institutional to the epistemic, this article aims to recover the displacements inherent to normative representations of foreign conflict.

In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the importance of casualty counts may be less the statistical reality of war such numbers purport to deliver than it is the symbolism these numbers provide. The ongoing conflict in Syria provides a central case study, approached ethnographically through two registers. First, the author examines on-the-ground casualty counting, demonstrating that what cannot be counted of war yet affects those journalists tasked to quantify war. This circumstance throws into doubt the utility of numbers – and the authority of journalism – for distilling war’s reality. Second, he examines how data on total wartime deaths in Syria, collected by monitoring organizations, is acquired and reproduced by journalists. Here journalists must reckon with the translation of statistical uncertainty into symbolic truth. Finally, the author reflects on the particularity of casualty counts as a journalistic convention, and considers how this particularity is hidden behind a journalistic common sense.

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This special issue introduction addresses the current stakes and possibilities of the work of Norman O. Brown. Beginning with a reflection on a recent Norman O. Brown conference, the introduction elaborates Brown's major theoretical interventions before providing brief synopses of the essays included in the special issue.