Description:
Conclusion:
"The three months of monitoring revealed that monitored state-controlled media in Burma do not
follow any professional journalistic standards, but only serve as a mouthpiece of the ruling
powers. Plain bias in favor of state officials and incumbents and no reflection of opposing or
critical views in state-controlled media was observed during the entire three-month monitoring
period. In the period preceding the elections, the main news programs of the state-controlled TV
channels were showing only the top state officials and completely ignored any other stakeholders.
They offered an exceptionally limited range of diversity of political actors, with any other
political subjects having virtually no access to the country?s most important sources of
information.
It is also of concern that these disturbing trends in the way the Burmese state-controlled media
cover political entities are not result of short-term anomalies, but genuine trends in the Burmese
media. These negative trends are to some extent meliorated by the exile media which do offer a
diverse range of views, with the main opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her party
National League for Democracy getting the most significant coverage. However, the potential
geographical coverage of the exile media, and thus their accessibility to Burmese population is
much lower than that of the state-controlled media in Burma.
Overall, election contestants were allowed only very restricted access to the media and were
prevented from fully enjoying their right of freedom of expression. The complete lack by the
media in Burma of any independent and objective reporting limited the voters? access to a broad
range of information which would enable them to make an informed choice at the ballot box."
Source/publisher:
Memo98
Date of Publication:
2010-11-05
Date of entry:
2011-07-02
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Language:
English