Breaking Newsrooms: Are Myanmar’s Exiled Journalists Getting a Fair Deal?

Picture: Frontier

In an article by Frontier, Ye Mon and Ben Dunant examines the challenges faced by Myanmar's exiled journalists and their struggle to maintain independence while operating from abroad.

While demanding schedules are common in the industry, a journalist who worked at a different organisation, The 74 Media, said she and her colleagues faced physical punishment for falling behind. 

The 74 Media, which is renowned for its bold coverage of Kachin State and elsewhere in northern Myanmar, was banned by the junta in May 2021 and went into exile. Journalist Pu Noi Tsawms travelled from Kachin to Thailand to join the outlet but was dismayed by what she found. She told Frontier that in the newsroom, the editors made reporters do squats for missing deadlines or forgetting instructions.

“I felt like they were humiliating and embarrassing the junior journalists,” said Pu Noi Tsawms, who has since left the organisation. 

The use of this punishment at The 74 Media was also highlighted in a report about Myanmar journalists by the Reuters Institute, published in July this year, igniting heated debate in the Myanmar media community on social media. The case cited in the report happened in the Kachin Independence Army-controlled town of Laiza in 2022, while the case documented by Frontier took place in Thailand the following year, suggesting widespread use of the penalty by the outlet.

The 74 Media’s management has separately acknowledged both cases, telling Frontier that in the “two or three times” it happened in 2023, reporters had the option of paying a small fine instead.

Many of the journalists must also spend large sums on documentation to stay in Thailand. In the Exile Hub survey, almost half of the journalists with immigration documents said these documents cost more than 30pc of their annual income, while about a third of undocumented journalists said they spent a similar amount on bribes.

Some news organisations help to pay at least part of these costs, while also arranging the documentation in a murky legal environment that journalists struggle to navigate. But although this help is usually welcome, it also increases journalists’ reliance on their employers and makes it harder for them to assert their rights.