" Hiding from Myanmar’s police, journalist Aung Marm Oo refuses to conceal his anger with the civilian government led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi as his country prepares for an election later this year. “Democracy is already dead,” the 37-year-old editor-in-chief of Development Media Group (DMG) told Reuters from a location he asked to keep secret. “They blocked media, restrict media agencies, banned news, punish journalists. Media is the lifeblood of democracy in the country. Without media, how can democracy survive?” When Suu Kyi was released from house arrest by a military junta in 2010, Aung Marm Oo was a student activist living in exile. Her release helped persuade him to return home and enter journalism. The 2016 election that brought Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) to power ended half a century of military rule. But the generals retain strong influence under a constitution that reserves sweeping powers for the military, and 25% of seats in parliament for its appointees. Aung Hla Tun, deputy minister for information, said the government had revoked some oppressive laws and was drafting both a right to information law and a hate speech law. Expectations of the first democratic government were “very high and very unrealistic” given “accumulated bad legacies and challenges our predecessors had left us”, he said. “We’re not capable of changing all these things drastically in three or four years,” he said in an email, adding that there was a need to promote trust and cooperation between the media and the pillars of power..."