State Media in Burma Silent on Thai Unrest

By KO HTWE Friday, May 21, 2010 While Thailand's increasingly volatile political crisis attracts the attention of much of the world's media, people in Burma are getting only a trickle of information about the situation in a country that is host to a vast Burmese migrant population. State-run television in Burma has provided scant coverage of the protests that paralyzed Bangkok for the past two months. The protests ended yesterday after Thai troops finally moved in to shut them down with a massive show of force that sparked riots that left much of downtown Bangkok in ruins. Residents of Rangoon listen to news. (Photo: AP) According to residents of Rangoon, the only reports of the unrest that are widely available to the public are those that appear in privately owned weekly news journals. For more up-to-date information, some are turning to foreign-based shortwave radio stations, the Internet, or international news networks such as CNN, BBC or Al Jazeera. State-owned Myanmar Radio and Television (MRTV), which has a monopoly on TV broadcasting inside Burma, has a channel—MRTV-4—that carries foreign news broadcasts, but only with a delay that allows censors to block any news deemed potentially harmful to the country's ruling regime. "I haven't seen any news about Thailand broadcast on state-owned television. I know about the situation there only through the Internet and journals," said  Si Thu, who lives in Rangoon. Win Tin, a leading member of the National League for Democracy, said that most of his information about Thailand was coming from shortwave radio stations. "Because of the lack of electricity, we get our news mostly from the radio," he said, adding that the situation in Thailand is "very complicated and difficult to assess." In Burma, the Ministry of Information's Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, which oversees the censorship board, routinely inspects and censors books, journals and newspapers, rejecting any politically sensitive material. So far, however, it hasn't prevented private publications from reporting some of the details of the crisis in Thailand.   "The state-owned media rarely reports about what is happening in Bangkok, but our journal can report the death toll and publish some photos," said the editor of a Rangoon-based weekly journal who spoke to The Irrawaddy on Thursday. Mandalay-based freelance reporter Nyein Chan said that now that the protests in Bangkok have been brought under control, the Burmese media may be given more freedom to report on events in Thailand. "Now they will be permitted to report more because the Thai army has crushed the Redshirt demonstrators," said Nyein Chan.  "But only journals closely connected to the regime will be able to report freely about the situation in Thailand." There are 326 licensed newspapers, magazines and journals in Burma. Source: State Media in Burma Silent on Thai Unrest http://bit.ly/94MEot (Yimber Gaviria, Colombia)

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