Fishbowl

Burmese Journalists = Poor Bastards

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By Neal

From the department of the blatantly obvious: Being a Burmese journalist is one of the world’s worst jobs. The Christian Science Monitor recently snuck past Myanmar’s authoritarian secret police to speak with employees of an unnamed weekly Burmese newsmagazine and reported on their findings.

First things first. As you might expect, there’s no freedom of the press there. Myanmar’s censors nixed 25% of the week’s articles out of hand. Among the casualties:

  • A newsbrief on the opening of a new college (Banned due to the fact that the event has yet to be covered by the country’s official newswire)

  • A wire story about a new fossil discovery in France (Myanmar’s military junta bans all positive press coverage relating to France as a protest against Nicolas Sarkozy‘s calls for democracy in Burma)

  • A stock cartoon depicting a bird standing at a blackboard, used to illustrate a story about rural schools...
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