Blacked Out
covering burma and southeast asia
Friday, March 29, 2024
Magazine

ARTICLE

Blacked Out


By Aung Zaw APRIL, 2006 - VOLUME 14 NO.4


COMMENTS (0)
RECOMMEND (313)
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
PLUSONE
 
MORE
E-MAIL
PRINT
(Page 3 of 4)

No reason for the censorship was given.

 

Maj Wunna, an air force officer who uses the pen name “Mar J”, was recently discharged from the military for an article he published in the weekly Yangon Times which gently satirized the regime’s move to Pyinmana.

 

In February, Reporters sans fronti?res and the Burma Media Association issued an urgent report saying that the military government is tracking down people who give information to the international media.

 

More recently, two photojournalists were sentenced to three-year prison terms on March 24 for taking video and still photographs in Pyinmana. They were first arrested last December. The threat to journalists in Burma remains a very real one.

 

Twelve journalists are currently among the more than 1,300 political prisoners in Burma, according to the RSF. The most famous of them is Win Tin, who has won international recognition for his pro-democracy engagement. In 2001 he was awarded the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom and the Unesco Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.

 

Apart from locking journalists up and censoring their work, the Burmese regime puts pressure on publications to trumpet its own propaganda and to carry articles attacking Western governments, the Burmese opposition and its detained leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Totally false news is also carried by the government-controlled press—the latest example was last month’s “official” account of how a former political prisoner, Thet Naing Oo, met his death. Eyewitnesses said he was brutally beaten up by officials on a Rangoon street. The government-controlled press charged falsely that Thet Naing Oo had started the fight.

 

Despite the difficulties faced by publishers and official distrust of communications technology and the media, the number of news journals and magazines is expected to rise. Currently, Burma has 157 news journals and 231 magazines. Although many publications have been unable to open branch offices in upper or lower Burma, some local papers established themselves in Mandalay this year.

 

While editors and senior journalists complain about heavy-handed censorship policies and extensive self-censorship, they also admit their staffs often lack qualifications and practical media experience. The Rangoon-based Living Color magazine wrote last year that the “majority” of journalists and reporters were young and needed nurturing. One veteran journalist in Rangoon estimated that more than 80 percent of the staff on local news journals were young people.

 

Despite their lack of practical experience, young journalists have a surprising degree of access to high-tech communication tools, such as the Internet, an advance that worries the regime.



« previous  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  next page »

COMMENTS (0)
 
Please read our policy before you post comments. Click here
Name:
E-mail:   (Your e-mail will not be published.)
Comment:
You have characters left.
Word Verification: captcha Type the characters you see in the picture.
 

more articles in this section