Breaking newsrooms: Are Myanmar’s exiled journalists getting a fair deal?

Journalists are allegedly suffering exploitation and abuse at exiled news outlets, but there’s debate over whether the responsibility to respond falls on donors or a media industry that is taking gradual steps to self-regulate.

By YE MON and BEN DUNANT | FRONTIER

Journalists are used to reporting from the front lines, but after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, they went from being observers to targets.

Staying in the country meant the constant threat of arrest or death at the hands of a regime that views all criticism as sedition, so many Myanmar journalists fled abroad, particularly to Thailand.

While they can report freely from exile, most of the journalists live precarious lives, often without proper immigration documents or traditional support networks, and with no idea of when they can safely return home. 

Besides these problems, the journalists also suffer very low pay and what some describe as unfair, and at times abusive, conditions in news organisations. 

These conditions partly stem from the circumstances of exile. News outlets have had to hastily abandon their assets and rebuild their operations in Thailand or elsewhere amid shared trauma, uncertain finances and a shaky legal status. As Myanmar’s crisis grinds on and foreign donor support for media dwindles, many of these outlets are struggling to survive. 

Yet, there is a growing number of public reports calling for Myanmar media workers to get a better deal – not only from their employers, but also the donors that fund them. Several journalists have also told Frontier of alleged exploitation and abuse at various organisations, breaking their silence on what they say are common problems that have been swept under the carpet for the sake of the industry.

There is no consensus, however, on how best to address these problems. Some have called on foreign donors, who largely fund exiled media, to take action against news outlets for allegedly mistreating staff. Others, though, have advocated for more self-regulation within the sector, including through newly formed industry bodies that journalists can turn to for help.

At the same time, there are demands that news organisations themselves do more to live up to their professed ideals of democracy, transparency and fairness, at a time when their uncensored reporting is more important than ever.

Frustrations boil over

“The editors said we had to work every day because we’re covering a revolution,” a journalist said about his year at an exiled news organisation after the coup, asking that both he and the outlet not be named to avoid repercussions. “We deserved to have at least one day a week off because we’re human.” 

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.

But the management insisted that most staff did not find the squats degrading. “The reporters in our newsroom know each other very well and feel comfortable doing squats together,” they said. They added that the reporters mostly opted for the physical punishment not only to avoid a fine, “but also because they have been sitting the whole day in office and it was like a small workout”. 

Nonetheless, the management said “this method is no longer used in our newsroom” and that The 74 Media was undergoing “a strategic review with an organizational development expert”. In the meantime, they said the organisation uses financial rewards as well as punishments to incentivise reporters, including regular bonuses for high achievers and occasional wage cuts for those who repeatedly underperform.

Frontier identified no other cases of physical punishment within the industry, but other forms of mistreatment are allegedly more widespread.

A report released this year by the organisation Myanmar Women in Media found that women were particularly vulnerable. Based on focus group discussions with 36 women and 20 men working in exiled media in Thailand, the report concluded that “Myanmar women media professionals face significant gender-based discrimination, gender-based violence and harassment on a regular basis”, including from their immediate colleagues. 

To cite one trend, “many” of the focus group participants “reported that those in senior positions often try to persuade their women juniors to have sex with them or their friends in exchange for promotions, salary raises, or to have their work published”. They added that these senior male journalists often took revenge on junior female colleagues if they refused their sexual advances, through punishments including a “reduced salary, not publishing articles or harassment until they were driven to quit”.

Meanwhile, steep power disparities and traditional gender roles mean women often feel they are taken advantage of in more everyday ways. This is particularly the case when exiled Myanmar outlets provide their staff with communal housing, which often doubles as a newsroom, due to insecurity and a desire to make up for very low salaries.

A report published this year by the Thailand-based organisation Exile Hub quoted an anonymous participant in a focus group saying that women journalists in these safehouses are often “treated as slaves, assigned cleaning and cooking duties simply because they are women”, and that they “face the risk of being fired if they refuse”. 

One such allegation was included in a joint letter from four former staff of Delta News Agency, including three women, to several donor and media support organisations in December last year to complain about the “bullying” they had suffered at the news outlet. One female complainant said the management forced her to come to the office early to cook food for others. She believes her eventual refusal contributed to her getting fired. 

Other alleged abuses at Delta News Agency affected both men and women. The outlet was founded in 2018 to cover Ayeyarwady Region but now reports on events across Myanmar from exile, having been banned by the junta in November 2021. The ex-staff in question had all worked at the outlet since the coup but not all at the same time. The allegations in their letter, which one of the authors shared with Frontier, also included underpayment, threatening behaviour, body shaming and attempts to smear staff when they quit.

Two of the complainants said the Delta News Agency founder U Soe Ya would fly into severe rages, prompting him not only to verbally abuse staff but also mistreat his pet dog in a way that felt threatening to others. “He often beats his dog severely to show his frustration and all the employees are disturbed by this,” one of them said. 

One female complainant said that when she asked to quit so she could work for another Myanmar media outlet, the founder “threatened me that I won’t escape from him no matter where I go”. She added that when a senior editor stood up for her, Soe Ya accused them of having a romantic relationship. This senior editor was one of the other complainants and also mentioned this incident in the joint letter.

Another ex-staff member said they “had to take frequent counselling” after they left the organisation because of the “mockery, bullying, and their mental abuse”. The complainant said the distress led them to quit journalism, despite their passion for it, adding, “I even have concerns for my safety and my family’s safety since I had to give my personal information to (Delta News Agency).”

After the allegations emerged, the news outlet’s management wrote a lengthy response to the same donors and media support organisations. It denied all the allegations but said Delta News Agency is “taking appropriate measures to address the issues raised in the complaint letter”. A separate former staff member of the news outlet, speaking to Frontier on condition of anonymity, explained that the complaints prompted the organisation to develop a new human resource policy in consultation with remaining staff, and with the help of a media support organisation.

Delta News Agency’s response letter also provided context, including the extreme trauma the team had been through since the coup. This included the regime’s confiscation of Soe Ya’s house in Ayeyarwady, displacing his parents; the arrest and sentencing of his younger sister to 10 years in prison for “assisting injured youth protesters”; the death of a close friend of the Delta News Agency team from military artillery fire while they were sheltering in Karen National Union territory in December 2021; and a struggle to rebuild their operation in Thailand with limited finances and security threats, including an attempted raid by unknown assailants.

The management told Frontier they had no further comments on the matter, but additional investigations found that some of the allegations against Delta News Agency were indeed not credible or seemed to be based on misunderstandings. For instance, one complainant alleged that the management did not pass on money to reporters that a journalist, Ko Aung Naing Soe, had provided to aid their relocation to Thailand, but Aung Naing Soe told Frontier he had given no such funds to the outlet’s management.

A power imbalance

While behaviour differs across news organisations, there are also structural factors at play. Inadequate salaries, for instance, often leave exiled journalists dependent on their bosses for shelter, food and protection, and therefore unable to respond to forms of alleged mistreatment. The Exile Hub report says that of 79 surveyed Myanmar women journalists in Thailand, more than half earned less than 10,000 baht (US$290) a month. Fifteen percent got under 5,000 baht, well below the Thai minimum wage for unskilled labour of about 8,000 baht per month.

Ma Mar Lar, a university student in Thailand who is researching the experience of exile Myanmar journalists in the country, said their already meagre salaries were drained by steep personal expenses, including healthcare. “I discovered that most exile media outlets cannot afford to provide health insurance for their journalists and would not cover medical expenses if a journalist needed to be admitted to hospital,” she told Frontier. 

“Most media outlets will only pay an advance (for health expenses) that will be deducted from the journalists’ salary,” she added, although Frontier could not confirm any examples of this.

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.

Relocation support is another source of leverage and makes female staff particularly vulnerable, the Exile Hub report found. “As some women journalists prepare to move to Thailand (from Myanmar), they are coerced into accepting contract terms that include unfair work commitments and decreased income,” said another anonymous focus group member.

The sense of obligation can also make it hard for them to leave their organisations. “When women journalists express their intent to resign, they face indirect threats”, the focus group member said. 

Journalist Ma Theingi Htun said when she asked to resign from large mainstream outlet Mizzima News in 2022 before her contract had expired, the editor-in-chief U Soe Myint made what she interpreted as a veiled threat. 

“The editor-in-chief asked if I remembered that students in 1988 who wanted to return home were killed in the jungle,” she told Frontier. This referred to student protesters who fled the Myanmar military’s brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy uprising in 1988 and regrouped in border areas controlled by opposition armed groups, before some of them opted to give up the struggle and make perilous journeys home.

Theingi Htun claimed that Soe Myint, a 1988 veteran who co-founded Mizzima in exile in 1998, made the same comment to her twice, during a one-on-one call and again in her online exit interview, where he ultimately allowed her to resign.

Ko Ye Min, who formerly led Mizzima’s television unit, told Frontier he was present at the exit interview and that Soe Myint’s remark was “a terrible threat”. 

However, Soe Myint denied ever making the comment or saying “any such thing” to Theingi Htun. He told Frontier that she, Ye Min and other staff were working for Mizzima in ethnic armed group territory, where travel in and out was dangerous and “not in Mizzima’s control”. He said this made early resignations difficult for the organisation, but insisted that Theingi Htun departed the organisation amicably.

A donor problem?

Theingi Htun has stuck by her story, saying, “The people who fought against the tyrants became tyrants themselves.”

However, she is unusual in choosing to speak out about alleged mistreatment. Most journalists hold back because of the power imbalance, or from a sense of guilt at knowing that other Myanmar people are in a worse situation.

Ja Mone, a former news anchor for Mizzima TV, said journalists often feel like their suffering is insignificant compared to the resistance fighters on the front lines or political prisoners languishing behind bars.

“Every Myanmar journalist is having financial difficulties, but they don’t want to talk about their suffering. Their work involves writing about the people’s problems, but nobody deals with the journalists’ problems,” she told Frontier.

Yet, many news organisations themselves are experiencing financial difficulties, which explains some of the problems of underpayment and can contribute to a tense environment where news teams struggle to find stability.

Ko John, editor of small post-coup outlet The Nation Voice, said he had to pawn his home in Myanmar to continue paying his journalists’ salaries.

“Our monthly expenses are about $6,000 but we only receive $3,000 to $3,500 from donors. That’s why we could not provide health insurance and a legal status for our journalists like major media outlets,” he told Frontier in an interview last year.

News outlets have very few sources of commercial revenue in exile, making them dependent on government and private donors who tend to be from Western countries, where Myanmar is rarely considered a priority.

“Donor organisations need to provide more financial support and employment stability for journalists,” said Ma Thu Thu Aung, the journalist who wrote the recent Reuters Institute report, adding that increased support could help fund health insurance, safety gear and other benefits. 

Yet, increased funding by itself will do little to ensure accountability in cases where journalists are mistreated. Both Thu Thu Aung’s and the Exile Hub reports therefore call for donors to conduct greater due diligence on organisations’ human resource policies.

Myanmar Women in Media said that the journalists in its focus groups “requested a means to report discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence directly to donor organisations that was clear and understandable”.

The group’s report gave one grave example of failed accountability. An unnamed Myanmar media outlet allegedly told a donor organisation that a male senior manager accused of sexual harassment had been fired, but in reality he continued working there. “The survivor was forced to continue working with the preparator until she quit for security reasons,” said the report, which did not say when this happened.

Frontier spoke to three major donors to Myanmar media but while all said they took cases of mistreatment seriously, none said they had a specific reporting channel for junior journalists in the organisations they fund.

An official of the State Department of the United States told Frontier, “The U.S. Embassy in Burma and the U.S. Agency for International Development are concerned by reports of exploitation and abuses within the Myanmar media industry. We strongly urge all media houses to uphold international labor standards, embrace equal opportunities for women and minorities, and take appropriate actions to protect employees.”

The official added, “Although no allegations of misconduct related to USAID funds have been raised to us, we encourage the people who have raised allegations to continue to voice their concerns.”

Sweden is another major funder of Myanmar media, and the deputy head of development cooperation at the country’s embassy in Yangon, Mr Joacim Carlson, told Frontier, “Sweden takes cases of abuse, exploitation and sexual harassment very seriously, and considers them akin to corruption.”

Carlson explained Sweden’s support was channelled through two implementing organisations, International Media Support and the Media Development Investment Fund, who have a responsibility to “identify, assess and mitigate such cases” and inform Sweden about them, although none have been reported so far.

Self-regulation

However, Myanmar Women in Media founder Ma Tin Zar Aung said appeals to donors are an act of desperation from reporters who feel they have no other options for securing justice. She told Frontier that, ultimately, Myanmar’s independent media sector needs to learn how to self-regulate and create its own systems for accountability.

Tin Zar Aung said her organisation was assisting the Independent Press Council-Myanmar, established in Thailand in December last year, in creating a mechanism to assess reports of gender-based discrimination, gender-based violence and sexual harassment. 

The new press council has dozens of Myanmar news organisations as members, including Frontier, and its chairperson is Nan Paw Gay, editor-in-chief of the Karen Information Centre and executive director of ethnic media coalition Burma News International. She told Frontier the council would “definitely investigate” cases of “psychological and physical harassment” but said there were limitations in how far it could intervene. 

“The IPC-M has received a complaint about a problem between a journalist and an employer,” she said, without divulging the details. “But we were unable to address the journalist-employer conflict. It was an internal issue.” 

The press council’s mandate to informally regulate the sector is also complicated by apparent factionalism within the independent Myanmar media industry.

Another post-coup group, the Independent Myanmar Journalist Association, publicly criticised the council while it was still in the process of being formed. The IMJA statement in August last year said the new council “does not adequately represent the diverse landscape of journalists”. It also objected to the creation of a mechanism to handle complaints against member news organisations, which it said distracted from the mission of “advancing independent news media” amid “military oppression”. 

There are also groups formed before the coup that still retain members, such as the Myanmar Journalist Network. In late 2022 it launched the “anti-wage theft campaign” in partnership with the International Federation of Journalists. The campaign aimed to end the underpayment of Myanmar journalists by both domestic and international media outlets, and it resumed this year with the drafting of a code of conduct for employers.

The code of conduct, seen by Frontier, includes commitments to fair wages and to creating a safe work environment free of bullying and harassment, and MJN members said media organisations would soon be encouraged to adopt it. However, employers may be unsure of who to listen to when faced with demands from different journalist associations that are seemingly working in parallel. 

August this year saw the creation of yet another group, the Myanmar Journalists Club, with an explicit focus on improving the employment conditions of journalists. Its opening announcement said, “Myanmar media workers are facing not only brutal torture and killings by the junta council but also severe rights violations within their own media organizations.”

The club’s spokesperson, who asked not to be named, added that this focus meant the MJC was not duplicating the efforts of other entities such as the IPC-M, which prioritise broader issues of press freedom and the survival of the industry. Moreover, the spokesperson said these other entities are not suited to addressing complaints by junior journalists because they were largely “founded or led by media house owners or senior editors, creating a conflict of interest when reporters seek to report rights abuses committed by media houses”.

By contrast, they said the MJC is “composed solely of working journalists” rather than senior editors or media owners, with more than 100 members employed at 39 media organisations, including Frontier, as well as freelancers. The club has already started accepting some complaints, which it pledges to investigate before contacting any media outlets that are implicated, with the option of going public if complainants consent. 

However, the spokesperson said these efforts do not let donors off the hook, because their role in keeping independent media afloat gives them a leverage no one else can match.

“Everyone, especially foreign donors, needs to take action, as media house owners only seem to listen to them,” they said. “We hope for a more positive approach, where donors fund media outlets that offer proper benefits like medical insurance or months of paid maternity leave to their reporters.”