In September 2017, editors from the ethnic media network Burma News International (BNI) gathered for a closed-door meeting in Hpa-An, Kayin State to discuss the fresh outbreak of violence in northern Rakhine and the impact on its network. Its Rakhine Buddhist member Narinjara News attended the meeting. Its Rohingya Muslim member Kaladan Press did not. One year later, in September 2018, there are no stories by Kaladan Press on BNI's website. In the current environment, being the only network in Myanmar with a Rohingya member is challenging and contentious.

The Rakhine crisis presents one of the most complex dilemmas BNI has faced during its fifteen-year history. Tensions surfaced with the first wave of anti-Muslim violence in June 2012, in the early days of the political transition. BNI's editor-in-charge, a Buddhist from Rakhine State, decided to stop posting stories from Kaladan Press on the network's news site. This unilateral move silenced the voice of the Rohingya member at a vital time and ensured that only the Rakhine member was heard. This was an abrupt wake-up call for the BNI leadership, already struggling to comprehend the political changes unfolding inside the country. To mitigate a potentially volatile internal crisis — and to create breathing space to evaluate the network's coverage of the anti-Muslim violence — a moratorium was placed on stories from both members.

The tensions did not stop there. In 2016, at BNI's annual ethnic media conference — held for the very first time in Rakhine State, in the historic town of Mrauk Oo — the Rohingya camps and the conflict were the elephant in the room, absent from the conference agenda. Kaladan Press was also absent. A group of Rakhine media outlets had made it clear that they would boycott the conference if BNI's Rohingya member attended, and there were concerns that the Rohingya editor would not be safe if he tried to cross the border from Bangladesh. One of the local Rakhine outlets, Root Investigative Agency — known for its coverage of the Rohingya plight — was also absent.

In August 2017, when violence again flared in northern Rakhine, BNI was once more confronted by its internal membership struggles. Once again, the leadership placed a moratorium on stories from its Rakhine and Rohingya members and endeavoured to calm tensions.

Local filmmaking has played a crucial role in Burmese society since the first Burmese feature film hit the silver screen in 1920. Even during the decades of supposed economic stagnation and political isolation, Burmese film studios continued to produce feature-length movies that entertained audiences in the hundreds of cinemas throughout the country. Numerous black and white Burmese motion picture classics continue to be shown on Myanmar television, and, from the 1990s, aspiring filmmakers have increasingly made use of digital production and distribution. With changing technologies, the establishment of the Yangon Film School and the momentum of international film festivals, a new generation of filmmakers in Myanmar have been using film to point to formerly taboo topics, and they have been engaging film communities in the international arena with their works.

In a context in which creative expression inside the country was heavily stifled by a stringent government censor board, what happens when international filmmakers and political documentarians are suddenly allowed to mix with local filmmakers? How has the atmosphere changed for the motion picture industry during the political transition of this decade? In her book on political transition and Brazilian women's filmmaking, Leslie Marsh observed that political aperturism in the country coincided with technological advances in film and video, which set the ground for greater alternative video production (Marsh 2013, p. 32). Although Marsh's study coincided with the transition in video production from celluloid to video, we can also consider the ways in which entirely digital video production, and even smartphone video cameras, have affected the ways in which people document social worlds and produce and distribute motion pictures about them.

Following a summary of secondary and primary sources on the subject of film production in Burma, I will present an overview of the history of the Burmese film industry, from the British colonial period, to independence, to the years of the Burmese Socialist Program Party, and then the SLORC/SPDC years of strict censorship.

In the mid-2000s, journalists from Burma working in exile in neighbouring countries faced constant safety challenges, be it intimidation from local police or surveillance by the Burmese military intelligence. In 2017, journalists from these same publications, now back in the country, faced new challenges: intimidation by government officials and arrests within the country. Given the uneven pace and patterns of change in Myanmar (see the introductory chapter to this volume) and the importance of media in covering these developments, it is useful to investigate how collecting and reporting news about Myanmar have evolved in line with the promises of that change.

In this chapter we use the twin concepts of precarity and mobilization to explore the tensions associated with media reporting about Myanmar over time, analysing the reporting of the (formerly) exiled media publication The Irrawaddy. The chapter explores coverage through an examination of the sources utilized and the substantive content and tone of the articles. We begin by reviewing The Irrawaddy's history and then position it through the lenses of mobility and precarity. After a discussion of methods, we compare the coverage in The Irrawaddy of three natural disasters, in both the English and Burmese editions, and supplement our analysis with interviews with members of staff. Our findings indicate that risks associated with reporting have lessened considerably, but tension remains as The Irrawaddy is hamstrung by conflicting goals that influence its coverage.

The Irrawaddy: Outside-In

The story of Myanmar's incomplete reforms would itself be incomplete without a discussion of The Irrawaddy, whose role as a publisher, in turn, of a monthly magazine, weekly print journal, video content, and now digital media has secured its place in the country's media history. Founded in exile in 1993 by Aung Zaw and other exiled journalists, The Irrawaddy went from an “amateurish, four-page newsletter” (Cochrane 2006, p. 87) to a website that reaches millions. Operating as exiled media from Thailand for its first two decades, The Irrawaddy's position — simultaneously out-of-reach from Myanmar's restrictive government but proximate to events in Myanmar at a time, prior to the internet, when information was not as easy to share across restrictive borders — allowed it to offer credible counter-narratives to official government sources. Its readership has included people both inside and outside the country, both English and Burmese speakers, and both military and opposition leaders (the latter while in prison), as well as other stakeholders.

In this chapter, I explore the challenges and opportunities that the 8 November 2015 national parliamentary elections presented for the Myanmar media, and their difficult relations with the Union Election Commission (UEC). A critical benchmark for the country's democratic transition, the elections marked the first time in more than half a century that a Myanmar government had been democratically elected and was able to take office. The quasi-civilian government headed by President Thein Sein acknowledged the defeat of the army-backed party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), and the civilian party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy (NLD), assumed power.

The findings in this chapter stem from field observations, interviews and print sources in Myanmar and English languages collected between 2014 and 2016. I observed these processes from within the UEC, where I worked as a senior technical advisor for international organizations supporting the electoral processes. I was personally involved in negotiations related to media access and journalists’ accreditation.

The first section of the chapter provides a brief overview of the legal framework that defines the concept of media space, with a specific focus on election day. Regulations included constraints on journalists’ ability to cover the elections, which affected their access to polling stations. The second section presents two very different — and often diametrically opposed — views held by the UEC leadership and private media representatives. The root causes of the deeply entrenched mistrust that I observed will be placed in the context of recent private media expansion in the country following the lifting of pre-publication censorship. This includes very different institutional cultures, fundamental disagreements about the role of private media, and diverging political preferences. As a result of the mistrust, there were numerous missed opportunities that could have improved communication among key stakeholders and, in turn, increased awareness about the voting process among the general public. That being said, on election day, media played a fundamental role in legitimizing the vote and enabling a wider acceptance of the results.

Media During the Pre-election Period

The people in Myanmar had previously witnessed their electoral choices being ignored by the military government (after the 1990 elections) or affected by systematic fraud (during the 2008 referendum and 2010 elections). This political history triggered a number of challenges for media covering the 2015 elections.

These reflections by Jane Madlyn McElhone begin to clarify the inextricable connection between the two decades of international aid during the military junta and the struggle to protect and increase the space for free expression and free media inside the country since the political opening. Although plans for top-down, government-led media reforms began shortly after a purge of military intelligence in 2004 (Kean 2018), media development efforts in, and for, the country have a much longer history. Empowered by decades of aid support — in the form of educational opportunities, training, and funding — editors, journalists, writers and free expression advocates from inside the country, the borderlands, and exile have seized the unprecedented opportunities presented by the political opening. They are pushing the boundaries of independent journalism, advocating and fighting for free expression and free media, and playing leadership roles, including mentoring what Ye Naing Moe affectionately calls “our new generation of watchdogs” (Interview 30; see appendix). They say these historic aid opportunities have provided an important impetus for change, and that they have helped them navigate the new media development narrative which some aid recipients, including some contributors to this book, argue too often prioritizes state media development and foreign policy agendas above local ownership and decision-making, public service, diversity and access for all. As they have always done, these media practitioners are working within, and pushing against, the constraints of the shifting space allowed for free media and free expression established by the government, the military and their cronies.

Against the comparative backdrop of international media development, we examine the dynamics that drove this historic support in Burma.

In the surrounding darkness, bright lights focus on the speaker on the stage, a famous writer. The noise of an electric generator competes with his voice. He uses vivid metaphors to illustrate the wrongdoings of those in parliament and the government. The audience responds with a roar of cheers and applause: “Yes, they are idiots! Curse them some more!”

The speaker needs to wait a while for the people to calm down. But soon enough, words from his speech hit a nerve once again, and the audience goes wild.

This is a typical scene at literary talks in Myanmar. Historically, such talks were a traditional affair that became popular during Myanmar's colonial days, but they were unofficially banned by the military junta during its rule. Though they have once again become popular since the relaxation of restrictions in 2010, most attendees have never before experienced such events. In fact, the audience, especially those from rural areas, has had no exposure to literature at all, given the overwhelming censorship during the junta years.

Even among users of social media — who are likely to be urban, well off and with greater exposure to literature — it is clear that awareness of different literary forms is low. So much so that posts on online forums such as Facebook often include the disclaimer, “The following is a satire. Please don't take it seriously before you make (terrible) comments.”

A History of Repression

This lack of awareness is a reflection of how the dictatorship crippled literature, the arts and media. From 1962 until 2000, all major print and broadcast media were owned by the state. The small-scale private media covered uncontroversial topics such as music, celebrity news, entertainment and sports. As a result, many citizens — including some writers — think the media are merely a tool to be used as a weapon for shaming or for propaganda. People also underestimate their own right to information, and the role of the media in ensuring this right. State media were used for government propaganda, and the media in exile turned into activist media determined to counter heavy censorship and the severe forms of control that stymied access to stories. In taking on the role of promoting democracy, the media in exile often lapsed into anti-government propaganda.

The moon is shining, some villagers are laughing out loud, and others weeping while they sit together in a village compound watching human rights films. A young girl stands up and reads Article 26, “the right to education”, from a printed handout of the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If this were pre-2010, it would have been a dream. In 2004 a group of young men in Yangon were arrested because they handed out human rights flyers in commemoration of human rights day (VOA 2004). For almost five decades while the country was under military rule, even the words “human rights” were forbidden in public spaces. The dream has come true today, but it did not come effortlessly.

In 2013 I became the co-organizer of the Human Rights, Human Dignity Film Festival in Yangon. We organized the festival for a simple reason — we were very suspicious of the political reform process initiated by the Thein Sein administration, the transformed military government. Like many of our fellow citizens, we wanted to push the boundaries of the so-called quasi-civilian rule, by using the human rights film festival as a tool. That's how Myanmar's first international human rights film festival came to be. The landmark human rights event was held in Yangon for five years. A mobile film festival that brought human rights films to audiences across Myanmar also grew in scope.

The abolition of pre-publication censorship in Myanmar resulted in a certain level of media freedom for the print media, but not for the film industry. In 2014 the film censorship board was recreated as the “Film Classification Board” under the Ministry of Information. In order to screen human rights films in downtown cinemas, authorization was required from the Film Classification Board. Without that official piece of paper, none of the commercial entertainment companies would allow us to host the human rights film festival in their theatres.

Therefore, in order to keep the festival running, we did not select overly sensitive films. That might be called self-censorship; yet, in 2013, the first year of the festival, all films submitted to the Film Classification Board — including a documentary film about human rights violations in Myanmar prisons based on the story of a political prisoner — got the go-ahead to be publicly screened.

The story of the Myanmar ICT for Development Organisation (MIDO) is closely related to the rise of blogging, which became popular in the country in the mid 2000s. Despite poor internet connections — which were mainly accessed at cyber cafes — and high levels of state surveillance, blogging offered individuals a platform to own their content and for expression, whether to discuss politics, social development or other personal interests like food and fashion. One of the well-known bloggers was Nay Phone Latt — now an elected member of the Yangon regional parliament for the National League for Democracy (NLD) — who was keen on creative writing as well as political commentary. Together, we formed the Myanmar Bloggers Society in 2007 and conducted basic training and workshops for start-ups and the blogging community.

Our first major public event in August 2007 was themed “We Blog, We Unite”, and we were able to attract about three hundred participants and private sponsors. A month later, the Saffron Revolution unfolded, and some of the bloggers and citizen journalists in the country, including Nay Phone Latt, wrote about the political situation and uploaded videos and footage of eyewitness accounts to the internet. These were shared by other media outlets and by individuals with their community members (OpenNet Initiative 2012). Because of this, the bloggers and citizen journalists became targets of the government, and some were eventually arrested. So, in the span of a month, the bloggers went from being popular to being avoided by everyone, as people were afraid and would not talk to us. In January 2008 Nay Phone Latt was arrested and charged under three different laws, including the 2004 Electronic Transactions Law, and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. We had to stop our public activities because we thought it would be dangerous for us. We channelled our work to quietly supporting activists and journalists to develop their technological capabilities.

In 2011 the quasi-civilian government of President Thein Sein announced the political opening of Myanmar, and in January 2012 Nay Phone Latt was released as part of an amnesty for political prisoners (CPJ 2012). We came together again, but this time we shifted our focus from merely promoting blogs to advocating for wider digital rights.

There are two views in our country on how to develop the media. One is that we need to prioritize proper media legislation. The other is that we need to change our mindsets.

In Myanmar there are times when the military respects the law, and there are other times when it uses the law to protect itself. Take, for instance, my arrest on 26 June 2017 in northern Shan State while I was doing my job — reporting on the war.

Before this incident I had often travelled to northern Shan State for the same purpose — to cover armed conflict — but I had never before faced arrest. In November 2016 there were clashes between the Northern Alliance of ethnic armed groups and the military. This happened in the northern Shan State townships of Mong Ko, Muse and Kutkai. When I travelled to Muse there were several army checkpoints between Kutkai and Namkham. At each checkpoint, soldiers checked my phone and my wallet. On my phone they looked to see whether I had taken photos with the rebels. In my wallet they checked if I had contact information for the rebels. If I had had those things, I would have been detained. But each time they let me go, because I did not have anything incriminating. At one checkpoint an army officer asked me whether I was a conflict reporter. I told him that I was and he said that I could accompany his troops to the front line. But once he understood that I would take him up on the offer, he told me that it would be a long process to inform the top officials and to get permission. It did not happen.

According to the law, I have the right to travel to the conflict areas. But when I was arrested in 2017 the army accused me of not having permission to be there. We have laws, but these laws are not always respected. Those who focus on improving media legislation in Myanmar need to remember that laws are not always followed here. Laws should not favour one side. They should protect everyone in the country, and be applied equally.

With the installation of a semi-civilian parliamentary system in 2011, Myanmar cast off its long-standing international “pariah-state” status and created conditions conducive to economic expansion. As the country increasingly gears its economy towards large-scale, landand resource-intensive development, there are serious, negative consequences for the majority rural population, long subject to land confiscations and other abuses under the military state.

At the same time, political liberalizations since 2011 have expanded the space for civil society and media, creating opportunities for forms of public contestation and political engagement that would have been impossible in previous eras. All over Myanmar, smallholder farmers in alliance with urban-based activists, volunteer lawyers’ groups, media workers and others have been mobilizing against land grabs, forced displacements and other threats. High-profile campaigns have emerged to challenge large investment projects. These movements are not without risk: violent crackdowns, threats of violence, and imprisonment of protesters continue in Myanmar, where the state is intertwined with powerful business interests, and authoritarian mentalities and practices persist. Still, the rollback of the most overt forms of state repression — together with new discourses of state accountability, democracy and rule of law — have encouraged diverse actors to test the possibilities for protest and political activity.

My focus in this chapter is on civil society mobilization in Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar, and particularly in Kanbauk, a village of about 1,500 households in the Tanintharyi Hills, eighty kilometres north of the regional capital, Dawei. In recent years, Kanbauk villagers have contended with Delco Ltd, a Yangon-based company that runs a tin and tungsten mine in their area in a production-sharing agreement with the government-owned Mining Enterprise No. 2. Villagers have been seeking to assert some influence over company practices, especially regarding the release of wastewater into local streams. Tensions intensified after an accident in September 2015 in which a tailing pond embankment collapsed causing a flash flood that led to the death of a child and the destruction of many villagers’ houses. I discuss the resistance effort that emerged in the village and the company's strategies to suppress and dismiss it. Specifically, I focus on the work of a Kanbauk writer and activist, Aung Lwin, and an evocative essay he wrote, published in May 2016 in Tanintharyi Weekly, a small regional publication.

In 2012, Yangon was abuzz with meetings and conferences on media development — something unheard of during the military regime. These meetings followed public announcements by the quasi-civilian Thein Sein government installed in March 2011 of a reform agenda that would include improvements to the media laws. According to the former information minister Ye Htut, these planned reforms date back to 2007, under the former military dictator Than Shwe, when the junta studied options for legal reform (Mclaughlin 2014), while Kean (2018) places the start of the change in 2004 after a high-profile purge of military intelligence. When the National League for Democracy (NLD) formed the government in 2016, expectations were high that technical and procedural problems with the laws and their enforcement would be reviewed and addressed (Htet Naing Zaw 2016). Yet civil society has been disappointed by the lack of political will to bring the laws in line with international norms and standards. Instead, the NLD-led government has continued to use criminal laws to silence journalists and critics. Globally, the media development sector has adopted a rather formulaic approach regarding reform, placing faith in problematic legislative and judicial systems as the arbiters of the practices and regulation of speech and expression. The emphasis that national and international actors in Myanmar place on laws as fundamental to the transition is thus not uncommon, yet it is questionable, especially in a country where the judicial process has been used to imprison critics and censor the media.

This chapter provides an overview of the laws related to media and free expression introduced or changed in Myanmar since 2011. We begin with a review of the literature on media legal reforms during transitions, followed by a mapping of the media laws in Myanmar and issues related to the reform process. We argue that the legal framework, while attempting to undo the controls of the past, has not been radically transformed. The paradigm of control has prevailed during this transition period, and the use of criminal laws has rendered some of the legal changes inadequate to support freedom, public interest, diversity and pluralism in relation to media and expression.

Media have immense power to shape the stories we hear and see and, by extension, how we understand the world. Through new technologies we contribute to the ongoing construction of these stories. It is no surprise that media are one of the first targets of authoritarian leaders who seize control, repressing or assimilating them somehow into the power structure. Forms of control in democratic societies are more subtle, and the threats less severe for those who challenge power holders, but media are nonetheless sites of struggle over who defines the public agenda as well as the discourse used to discuss it. Media play multiple, shifting and highly contextual roles, perpetuating the status quo as agents of stability; holding officials and official institutions to account as agents of restraint; and challenging the status quo and holding the powerful to account as agents of change (McCargo 2003). We have seen throughout this volume how a single media outlet can play all of these roles at various times. As media have become more pervasive in our lives, it is vital that we understand as much as possible about the people and organizations that produce the stories we see, what effects these representations are having, and how these phenomena function for or against the interests of the various key stakeholders, especially the public, at local, national and global levels.

The field of media studies in Myanmar is just beginning to develop. This short summary addresses only the research published in English, but we encourage a similar assessment of the research available in Myanmar language. The majority of research in English is comprised of reports written by advocacy organizations or journalists, and is mainly descriptive, although some reports do analyse new or reformed media laws, or assess the changing state of freedom of expression. This body of work is also largely focused on journalism and on events in the major cities of Yangon and Mandalay. While media studies include the study of journalism, the field is much broader in scope, incorporating all types of media platforms and content and moving beyond the “how-to” to focus critical and analytical attention on three primary areas: media texts, media audiences and media industries. In Myanmar, media-related educational opportunities focus on practical journalism skills training, and to some extent filmmaking.

Eventually it would help her understand comments on her Facebook feed, like “Kalars should get out of our country” and “Kalars are setting our country on fire”. A gift to her from her father when she passed her school matriculation exam, her vintage radio played the BBC, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia for three hours every morning and night. She listened to it faithfully, earning her the nickname “grandmom”. Then, in 2012, when Khin Oo was 28, her radio reported that violence had broken out between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.

Khin Oo is Muslim. She has a small frame and speaks in whispers. “I love getting and sharing information”, she told me. After the 2012 Rakhine riots, and what she learned from the news, she said, “I knew I needed to work for peace and educate my people and those who hate us.” She set her sights on working in Mandalay, a town a few hours away from her home in Shan State, with an organization working to promote peace and education.

Khin Oo finally made it to Mandalay in 2014, where she began working with a peace organization, and also enrolled in law school. The deadly beating of a young Buddhist man that same year, publicized on Facebook, led to an unexpected beginning. “Muslims are responsible for the beating” and “Muslims should leave the country” someone behind her said when he thought she could not hear. No one would sit near her in class after the beating. One day, in her second year of school, she saw several posts on her Facebook newsfeed about a monk who had fallen in the market. The posts said a woman, said to be Muslim, tripped him. Users threatened revenge against the Muslim responsible, and others weighed in with slurs against the Muslim faith. The next day, mobs burned several shops and homes in retaliation. The truth, she later learned, was that a young Muslim girl had accidentally run into a monk, causing him to fall. A minor incident had escalated into an aggressive act, leading people to blame a religious community, wrongly, and to commit acts of violence for revenge. She saw what could happen when people take action based on incomplete or incorrect information.

The publication in 2013 of Myanmar's first private daily newspapers in half a century was one of the most important and exciting moments for journalists and editors since the country's political opening. Thiha Saw launched one of those first private newspapers — the Englishlanguage Myanmar Freedom Daily. He has been part of the country's print media sector since 1979, most recently as executive editor at Myanmar Consolidated Media (MCM), where he oversaw the country's only English-language daily, Myanmar Times, a Myanmarlanguage weekly, and MCM's online team. Myanmar Media in Transition contributing editors Jane Madlyn McElhone and Gayathry Venkiteswaran interviewed veteran publisher, journalist and editor Thiha Saw in 2017 and 2018 to talk about his experiences and his expectations of the political opening.

Q: You are one of Myanmar's print media veterans and a vocal champion of the private media sector. You got your start, though, during the military regime working for state-controlled print media until an unexpected chance came along to do independent journalism.

TS: Yes, I started at one of the two English-language state papers, Working People's Daily, in the late 70s, and then moved to the statecontrolled Myanmar News Agency in the early 80s. Then, in August 1988 [during the student-initiated uprising], we got our chance. A group of young and mid-career editors, including me, took over six Burmese- and English-language newspapers and ran a free press for about three weeks. We told the chief editors to go away and had a brief, amazing, period of press freedom. Then a new military government took over and they sent me a letter saying I was allowed to “retire” prematurely.

Despite the new military regime and your own so-called retirement, that's when you started witnessing slow change in the print media sector.

Well, there was strict pre-publication censorship, so there was no possibility of having a private daily newspaper, but there were dozens of private monthlies run by journalists and writers. So in 1990 I launched my first private publication — a monthly business journal called Myanmar Dana. To publish on time, we had to send our content to the censors at least one week before deadline. We also had to find someone who would lease us a licence. In those days licences were issued to government departments or officially recognized groups, like writers’ groups or associations for retired police officers.