Doing news work in Myanmar comes with high risk to life and safety, in a profession with uncertain prospects for the future. Since 2021 the coup, the junta has been using legal persecution as a weapon against journalism and journalists.

ผู้สื่อข่าวเมียนมามักคุ้นเคยกับสภาพการทำงานที่ยากลำบาก แต่การรัฐประหารโดยกองทัพในเดือนกุมภาพันธ์นี้ ทำให้เกิดคำถามที่ว่า คนในวิชาชีพสื่อสารมวลชนจะยังทำอะไรได้บ้าง โดยที่ชาวเมียนมาได้ทำอาชีพนี้อย่างจริงจังแค่ 10 ปีหลังนี้เอง

Myanmar has become a case study for how disinformation, fake news and hate speech affect online space and content, and therefore, public perceptions and debates. In this Q & A, The Irrawaddy’s Moe Myint shares his insights about the challenges, some of them very dangerous for professional journalists, thrown up by the toxic online environment marked by misinformation and deep divisions in Myanmar today.

Myanmar may be a politically freer country, but has many more challenges to media freedom today. In this chat with Reporting ASEAN’s Johanna Son,  Yin Yadanar Thein, the co-founder of Free Expression Myanmar, says the country’s undemocratic habits – including the Aung San Suu Kyi-led government’s policies toward the press – will take a long time to unlearn.

Talk of media freedom in Southeast Asia these days has to include media accountability. It is time for the different users of the information sphere – journalists, media houses, media monitoring groups, journalism professors and researchers, consumers – to protect the space for free media to operate, Johanna Son writes in this analysis for World Press Freedom Day.

Reporting on the Rohingya is a tricky assignment, requiring Myanmar’s journalists to pick their way between pressures from the government and from the public. Many avoid discussing the topic too much for reasons of personal safety as well as the political and financial survival of their news outlets, explains Johanna Son in this Reporting ASEAN analysis.