In The Line of Fire
A loss to journalism is a win for dictators everywhere
My maths is rusty. Somehow I had it in my head this is my 200th issue and planned to write about journalism, given what I do and what’s been happening to the global media landscape since Jan 20.
But a nagging little voice in my head told me to double check so I did a stocktake of my site and discovered this is actually the 202nd fully-fledged issue of Thin Ink. D’oh.
I’m forging ahead despite this little snag because I am nothing if not stubborn. Also, I think the sentiment still holds.
Good, independent journalism is essential. Period. It doesn’t matter what era we’re in, who is ruling us, and whether everything is going well. It is a public good. Yet its value is only noticed in times like these.
So here’s a gentle reminder: please remember to continue supporting good, independent journalism when we return to better times.
Btw, as if things can’t get worse for my home country, a massive 7.7 magnitude quake hit central Myanmar just hours ago. It looks devastating. The epicentre, Sagaing Region, has seen some of the fiercest fighting between the junta and pro-democracy forces and has been subject to regular internet blackouts by the military.
We had a nightly ritual when I was growing up. Once the evening news broadcast by “Myanma Athan” (Myanmar’s Voice) was over, we would close the windows and doors of our living room and adjoining coffee room.
After ensuring every single one of them was tightly shut and there was no chance of the sound waves slipping through any cracks and travelling across the lawn and on to the pavement and street outside, my grandfather would change seats.
He would leave the chair he normally occupied in the middle of the living room to the one at the back, next to a small, black, unobtrusive radio sitting atop a coffee table.
He would then switch it on for the real news: back-to-back broadcasts from the Burmese desks of Voice of America (VOA) and the BBC, outlets that Myanmar’s successive dictators have accused of airing “sky full of lies” and being “assassins on air”. Sometimes he’d add Radio Free Asia (RFA) into the mix.
I don’t remember when my grandfather started listening to these broadcasts, but I remember vividly how important they were to him, and by extension, our entire family. This was in the 80s and 90s and news about what was happening outside our town and our community was a precious commodity.
Media was very tightly controlled, and every song lyric, movie script, cartoon, and articles had to undergo mandatory scrutiny before they could be published. I think there was a single shop in the whole of Rangoon/Yangon, the then-capital of Burma/Myanmar, where you could buy foreign news magazines like Time, Newsweek, and Readers’ Digest. But their availability was intermittent because any issue that mentioned Myanmar didn’t make it to the shelves.
So those radio broadcasts by the VOA and BBC were our daily windows not only to what was happening within our country but also to the rest of the world.
Even after Myanmar opened up suddenly after the 2010 elections, people continued listening religiously to these broadcasts. By then my grandfather had left this world for over a decade and I had stopped listening to them by proxy for many years.
But the dismantling of VOA and RFA two weeks ago still feels like a personal loss.
Learning from the Worst
When Myanmar’s military staged its coup in 2021, one of the first things it did was to cut off internet and phone lines across large parts of the country and throttle 3G mobile networks.
Within days, it also raided the offices of news outlets and banned a handful of them, including the agency I had originally founded in 2015. It knew that accurate information was an enemy to authoritarianism.
In their attempt to bully, suppress, defund, and demonise media outlets, I can’t help but feel Trump and his acolytes are reading from the same script as the Myanmar’s junta, including hand-picking who gets to cover Trump, resorting to cheap school yard taunts, and smearing journalists to cover up for their own clusterf**k.
When news broke on Mar 16 that “more than 1,300 Voice of America employees were placed on leave… and funding for two U.S. news services that broadcast to authoritarian regimes was terminated”, I was working on (1) a presentation to Burmese newsrooms on how to pitch to international media, to be delivered the next day, and (2) discussing with The Kite Tales’ board of trustees on raising fresh funds to support Burmese journalists who have lost their jobs due to USAID cuts.
Many of us knew the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), VOA’s parent agency, would be in trouble as soon as Trump returned to power, but we didn’t think it would be this swift, brutal, or include the termination of grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and RFA.
Again, the gaslighting administration cited “waste, fraud, and abuse” to shut down services that broadcast to some of the world’s most brutal regimes, including Burma, North Korea, Russia, and China.
“Trump's directives look set to devastate an organization that serves as a rare source of reliable news in authoritarian countries,” said Reuters.
But it goes beyond that. In one stroke, some of the world’s loudest free speech warriors had both muzzled the press and, as RFA put it in an article, rewarded “dictators and despots”.
The move also “directly endangers RFA staff abroad and could potentially lead to the deportation of 30 journalists based in the US, some of whom risk persecution in their home countries”, said Reporters Without Borders, citing how three freelance journalists who worked with the outlet are currently in detention in Vietnam.
So a rare triple win for the bad guys.
The organisations are not taking this lying down: the VOA, RFE and RFA staff are all suing the administration. A federal judge temporarily allowed RFE/RL to stay open at least until March 28 (today), saying the Trump administration “cannot overrule Congress, which gave the news outlet a statutory mandate to promote the freedom of opinion and expression”.
A ray of hope? Perhaps, since the funding was restored two days after the judgement, but the administration said it still reserves the right to terminate the RFE/RL’s financing “at a later date” if it “were to determine that such termination was appropriate”, according to the NYT.
Not for the Faint-hearted
On Mar 17 morning, as we sat around a U-shaped table at a Chiang Mai hotel meeting room, most of us were still shell-shocked.
The common refrain from the Burmese newsrooms was, “Well, I guess if they could do it to VOA and RFA, then of course it’s not surprising they did it to us.”
Over the course of that week, I caught up with old friends and made new ones, and spoke to nearly two dozen Burmese journalists and editors in multiple newsrooms. I did not find a single outlet that remains unaffected by cuts from the USAID or the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
I met newsrooms where a third to a half of their funding had disappeared overnight. The luckier ones lost a fifth or a quarter. As news reached them at the end of the month, just before the next tranche of funding was supposed to come, the most affected had to scramble to find salaries for staff.
The fact is, journalism has always been a dangerous profession in Myanmar. Even during the country’s fleeting decade of openness, it was a low-paid, thankless job that frequently invited more vitriol than thanks. Most are in it for the passion, not wealth or glory.
I remember being shocked when I first went back in 2015 and was told $300 a month was considered a pretty good salary for an entry-level journalist. This has barely changed in many newsrooms over the past decade.
When I first decided to enter the world of journalism in 2005 after finishing my Masters, I was told it was a dying profession and industry, that I was better off (literally and figuratively) doing something else. But for many of us, journalism is a bug: we do it because we can’t NOT do it and we can’t imagine ourselves doing anything else.
Of course, the situation deteriorated significantly after the coup. Scores of journalists have been harassed, arrested, tortured and killed. In fact, the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2024 census found China, Israel, and Myanmar as “the world’s three worst offenders” in terms of jailing journalists.
Most independent media were forced out of the country and into exile, and hundreds of reporters lost their jobs. Many fled across the border to try and continue working, often living illegally. Those who could not or would not leave have to keep a low profile and do whatever job they can find. They became taxi drivers, or shopkeepers. Pretty much anything to make ends meet.
Since then, I’ve met reporters who have been working for a pittance since the coup while trying not to get arrested and deported back home. Now, many are facing the prospects of further pay cuts or not being paid at all for the foreseeable future.
One with a creaking little car is moonlighting as a driver but without legal papers, they have to regularly bribe law enforcement officials so their car won’t be confiscated and they won’t be sent back. Another was told their name has appeared on the military’s list of people selected for conscription. Yet another lost a job offer because it came from a newsroom affected by the Trump cuts.
Still, pretty much all of them told me they’re determined to continue working. Their resolution both inspired me and broke my heart.
A Global Issue
What’s happening to Burmese newsrooms is just the tip of the iceberg, however, because the impact is being felt all around the world, in outlets big and small, new and old.
In El Salvador, USAID accounted for 70% of the budget for Voz Pública, a small newsroom focused on fact-checking and investigative journalism. They had to halve their team, at a time when its millennial autocrat president Nayib Bukele is openly critical of independent journalism.
Then there’s Colombia’s award-winning La Silla Vacía, 39% of whose funding comes from USAID (9%) and Meta’s soon-to-be-abolished factchecking programme (30%). How will they cover the upcoming elections in 2026?
For many small, independent Ukrainian outlets operating near the frontlines, 50% to 75% of their budgets are funded by USAID grants. Like in Myanmar, many of these outlets have little to no viable advertising market, and raising money through subscriptions or reader revenue remains a pipe dream.
How about investigative journalism, which is often time-consuming and expensive, the complete antithesis of our Tik-Tok culture? Well, US government funding amounted to 38% of Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global network of investigative journalists. OCCRP says it will survive but is concerned for its local members, who were already operating in extremely hostile environments.
These are just a few examples from a piece by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that spoke to 15 editors about the impacts. But there’s more. Below is an except from an NYT article published a month ago.
“Accountability-focused outlets in Cyprus and Moldova lost upward of three-quarters of their budgets overnight, while In-depth Solomons, among the only independent outlets covering the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands, lost 100 percent. A $144,000 grant to the Daphne Foundation, an investigative journalism endeavour in Malta, was cancelled.”
Of course, we should rethink how public service journalism is funded and how it came to be so reliant on donors - apparently USAID was the largest public donor for this globally - but that’s for another issue and will require a dissection of our inability to value good journalism and our complicity with social media platforms’ destruction of the news business.
I’m sure the world’s tyrants are encouraged by the latest turn of events. Just look at what’s happening in Indonesia and Turkey, not to mention the deliberate targeting of journalists in Gaza.
Over the past few days, Tempo, one of Indonesia’s best-known news outlets, was sent a severed pig’s head and beheaded rats. The outlet believes these acts of intimidation are linked to its investigative reporting.
In a statement condemning the “harassment”, the Committee to Protect Journalists said the incidents came weeks after President Prabowo Subianto, a notorious former general, alleged that foreign-funded media organisations are trying to “divide” the country.
On the same day the pig’s head was delivered, “protesters gathered outside Indonesia’s Press Council building and demanded it take action against Tempo, accusing the outlet of acting in the interest of “foreign agent,” billionaire financier George Soros”, CPJ added.
In Turkey, many journalists have been arrested and a BBC reporter deported for covering the mass protests that followed the jailing of Istanbul’s mayor, a top rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Giving In to Dictators
In times like these, it is easy to think capitulation is the answer. And worryingly, it is already happening (see here and here as just two recent examples).
Pointing out how major American TV networks tied themselves into knots not to call the Gulf of Mexico by its name to avoid Trump’s ire, Covering Climate Now asked in its latest newsletter:
“Will US broadcasters now be similarly squeamish about stating as fact the long-settled science that climate change is real, extremely dangerous, and caused mainly by burning fossil fuels? Will news organisations perhaps stop using the term “climate change” altogether, now that Trump has had it removed from many government websites?”
Again, I can’t help but see the parallels between what has happened in Myanmar - and what’s still happening there - with what’s now happening in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The one thing I’ve learnt having been born and raised in a military dictatorship is this: You cannot placate them. They will never be satisfied. They always want more, even after you have given them Every. Single. Thing. they have asked for.
Also, self-censorship is a slippery slope that only emboldens despots. Before long, we’ll be telling ourselves things aren’t as bad as that (whatever that may be), at least we can do this thing (however tiny this thing may be), and that it is too late to do anything anyway and keeping the peace is the most practical response. We need to resist.
I once got into a heated argument with a recently released Burmese political prisoner, a young man whose future was destroyed when the military threw him in jail for being a student protester. When he was released many years later, he was barred from continuing his studies, so was attending classes at a small, independent education centre. I was there to talk about journalism.
He told me, with perfect conviction, that the media’s role is to protect the nation’s reputation and thus refrain from any criticism or revelation of abuses committed by the government, especially if it’s a popularly-elected one.
I was flabbergasted.
I find the idea both pernicious and the antithesis of a democracy. I told him that perhaps the powers-that-be should not engage in abusive behaviour if they don’t want to be called out. He wouldn’t budge. We ended the discussion at a stalemate.
I remain disturbed by that argument to this day and I fear the world is hurtling towards a scenario where the only journalism that is allowed will be the type that will brown-nose the emperor and his band of brothers.
If you don’t want such a world, please speak out, and please support good, independent journalism, whether it’s your local paper muckraking about small-time corruption and nepotism or bigger outlets taking a macro view. Please find out who’s the ultimate owner and whether their politics are seeping into the news you read and watch. Please question if they refuse to criticise those in power, particularly if you support those in power.
I’m fully conscious that journalism is an extractive profession in many ways and we need to improve how we do things too, from our business models to our engagement with people in general. It is also made up of flawed humans and contains bad actors who prey on others, like in any profession.
But many of us are also ardent believers in justice and accountability, and the vast majority of journalists I know are in it for that cliched reason: we want to make a difference.
Help us.
Thin’s Pickings - Journalism Edition
On the Arrest of an Autocrat - Columbia Journalism Review
Shiela Coronel on former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s journey to The Hague. A man who openly called for violence and applauded it and hated journalists who called him out on it. It is a sobering as well as inspiring read.
“Impunity is the norm for the powerful in the Philippines. Duterte’s arrest is a fluke. Yet it would not have been possible without years of difficult, dangerous, painstaking work. Journalists, photographers, lawyers, Catholic clergy, and human rights activists persisted even when hope for accountability seemed nonexistent. There would have been no case if the mothers, sisters, and daughters of the drug war dead had not dared to tell their stories. If former death squad assassins had not found protection and safe passage out of the country, they would not have been able to testify in The Hague.”
Duterte is Enjoying the Process He Denied to His Thousands of Victims - New York Times
An accompanying piece to the above, by Patricia Evangelista whose book I recommended in a previous issue, on the stark difference between the treatment meted out to people killed with Duterte’s implicit consent and the due process he’s receiving.
Green lobby controversy backfires on EPP lawmaker - Follow The Money
Those following the bitter fight in Brussels over right-wing lawmakers’ attempts to restrict funding for green groups would be familiar with the name Monika Hohlmeier. The German lawmaker has been front and centre in this attempt, tabling bills to regulate the NGOs and cancel existing contracts.
But in true public interest journalism fashion, FTM has found a contract “showing that the Bavarian agricultural trading giant BayWa had also received millions of euros from the Commission” under the very same program Hohlmeier has been very critical about.
“And on its supervisory board? Monika Hohlmeier – with a yearly allowance of 75.000 euros (plus expenses).”
This was part of FTM’s newsletter and I couldn’t find an article about this, but I hope they will do a proper, longer story.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Catastrophe - Thinking about… by Timothy Snyder
Clear-eyed, useful, and terrifying advice from guest writer Laurie Winer, journalist and founding editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books, on “things to watch for, all warnings from the well-known story of the Third Reich”.
Collaborative Journalism is Our Only Future - Columbia Journalism Review
From Laurent Richard, founder of Forbidden Stories on moving away from “lone wolf” journalists to more collaborative models. This is also the ethos of my colleagues who set up Lighthouse Reports.
“We must work with colleagues who were yesterday our competitors, creating and respecting common rules, and sometimes setting our egos aside.”
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