Burma Chooses Chinese Media Model

Michael Hedges November 15, 2010 Follow on Twitter

The digital age has spawned media models galore. There are many to choose from. There’s the internet free-for-all model. There’s Mr. Murdoch’s pay-for-everything model. There’s also the Chinese model.

As expected the release from house arrest of Burmese opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi (November 13) was met with massive media international coverage. Despite persistent restrictions and censorship major news agencies – Reuters, dpa, AFP and a few others – have maintained bureaus in the country. Local coverage, according to ex-pat bloggers, was muted.

The Burmese military junta, closely following the Chinese model of media control, loosens and tightens restrictions on international media when it suits them. All Burmese local media is government controlled. Similar controls are now felt from Malaysia and the Philippines to Vietnam and Singapore. Clearly, the generals wanted international coverage of Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from custody, however controlled. 

International broadcasters were all over the story, none more than the BBC World Service. The Burmese service is one of its oldest language services, which marked its 70th anniversary last September. That date was followed within a week by rumblings of its potential demise.

“The Burma office is up for grabs,” said an unidentified British Foreign Office official to The Guardian (September 7). “It is a question of costs. It is very expensive and has relatively few listeners. The human rights argument doesn't hold much sway with the new Foreign Office.”

“Scrapping the World Service in Burma would be a gift to the military junta,” said UK opposition Labour Party foreign affairs spokesperson David Miliband, also to The Guardian. The Burmese generals have referred to the BBC as “sowing hatred among the people” and “designed to cause trouble.” Perhaps the new UK Conservative Party government, in suggesting an end to the BBC’s Burmese language service, was sending a message to the generals and, by proxy, to the Chinese leadership.

After a few more days, the UK government was spinning a slightly different story (“The Burma service doesn’t cost that much”) as the BBC World Service ramped up transmitter coverage ahead of the first general election in Burma since 1990, November 7th. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won the 1990 election, which landed her in jail or under house arrest for most of the last 15 years.

International news coverage of the 2008 Cyclone Nargis, which devastated the country and sent refugees streaming into neighboring Thailand embarrassed and displeased the generals. CNN Asia correspondent Dan Rivers filed reports from weather-ravaged Irrawaddy Delta areas before being deported for working in Burma on a tourist visa. Rivers reports won an Amnesty International award. He was given a journalist visa in March 2010 to cover one of the generals’ favorite events – a military parade – but was, once again, deported shortly after arriving. BBC reporters Andrew Harding and Paul Danahar were also deported while attempting to cover the Cyclone Nargis disaster. 

Japanese news agency APF reporter Toru Yamaji arrived (November 6) in Burma to cover the recent elections, sans visa, and was immediately “detained” by secret police. Before his release three days later, through Japanese government intervention, he’d been kept in “a solitary room in what looked like a pigpen covered with bars.”

The Burmese generals were quite clear in their attitude toward international media coverage of those elections. New visas for foreign reporters would not be granted. Just before the elections, Reuters estimated there were 25 Burmese nationals and two Chinese working as correspondents for 17 news agencies in Burma. The junta said that number was sufficient and they’d not be letting in any others. International broadcasters relied, as they have for many years, on anonymous sources within Burma.

Inside Burma, election news coverage was, predictably, one-sided. Memo 98, a press freedom watcher based in Slovakia, identified “an exceptionally limited range of diversity” in State media’s coverage. “Basically there (was) no information about the candidates,” said Memo 98 analyst Marek Mracka in a report to Voice of America (VOA).

“The radio they can listen to; Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Free Asia or Democratic Voice of Burma Radio,” said Memo 98 Burma coordinator Zaw Win to VOA News (November 5) Radio is easy to listen, so they can access all the information by radio. For the television is very limited. All the Internet is very limited. You have to go to Internet cafe. Opposition groups’ website you cannot access. Access denied all the time.”

Reporters sans Frontiers (RSF) branded Burma “an enemy of the internet” for its history of choking or blocking access to websites ranging from Facebook to the half-dozen exile-based news sites. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said it’s the worst country in which to be a blogger. RSF says about 15 Burmese blogger/journalists currently sit in jails.

With Aung San Suu Kyi’s release appearing imminent word was passed by her lawyer, reported by AFP (October 18), that the world would soon have a new Twitter user. “She wants to have a Twitter account to speak and discuss with the world's teenagers,” said attorney Nyan Win. “She said she can be in touch with them every day if she has this account.”

Internet access in Burma is expensive and highly restrictive. Internet café operaters are required to notify authorites of unauthorized usage. Across Asia, social networking sites - Twitter, Facebook and some local sites – have become defacto news sites where government media controls are most severe.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s first interview – by telephone - since leaving house arrest was with the BBC World Service’s Alastair Leithead (November 14). “I never thought I was alone, partly because of the BBC.”

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