Fixers As Co-creators of Foreign Reporting: Focus on Hungary

The chapter aims to explore the work of fixers and the contribution they make to the work of foreign journalists covering a small, geopolitically irrelevant country that has previously been a blind spot for international coverage, at a time when there has been increased media attention and greater demand for original reporting on the given subject. The focus of the chapter is Hungary, an EU member state which has undergone visible democratic backsliding in the last decade, thereby creating political dilemmas for a number of EU member states, and turning into a hot political topic as well as a puzzle for democracy theorists and policymakers. Building on semi-structured interviews with people who help foreign journalists as fixers, the chapter explores how foreign media approach Hungarian topics, as well as the new roles created in the current situation for fixers to shape coverage, and to gain access to an international audience. The research enters partly uncharted territories, as past research on fixers has been focusing mainly on conflict zones in developing countries, not on countries with close proximity to the “West”.