By Jon Allsop for Columbia Journalism Review

Last week, Yogita Limaye, a correspondent at the BBC, filed a dispatch from Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, which had just been hit by a devastating earthquake.

She reported from a Buddhist academy where dozens of monks had been taking an exam when the building pancaked and where, she said, the “stench of decaying bodies” was now overwhelming; the BBC’s cameras captured relatives crowding around as rescue workers pulled a corpse from the rubble, but it was so disfigured as to be unidentifiable.

Elsewhere, Limaye came across ruins where no official relief efforts had yet begun; at one home, local residents had used makeshift equipment to extract the bodies of an older couple, who were found in each other’s arms.

Limaye also filmed at a hospital, where wounded people were lined up in rows outdoors. “There were very few doctors and nurses around to cope with the demand for treatment,” she wrote. “Families are stepping in to do what medical staff should.”

Limaye and her team couldn’t stay long at the hospital for fear of being detained by the authorities; indeed, she conducted her whole visit to Mandalay undercover, taking care to dodge not only the country’s ruling military junta and its police force, but their networks of spies and informants among the population.

Limaye was seemingly the first foreign journalist to get into the quake zone since it struck, with officials having warned the international press to stay away; they cited a lack of essential services and accommodation, but journalists who have covered the country saw this both as a flimsy pretext to control the narrative and a continuation of the junta’s zero-tolerance attitude toward independent reporting. (By contrast, foreign journalists rushed to cover the effects in neighboring Thailand, which was not particularly close to the epicenter of the quake but where tremors did cause a building to collapse while under construction—though this, too, was a story about Myanmar since many of the laborers on the project had migrated from the country, part of a much broader wave in recent years.)

Unlike after previous disasters, including Cyclone Nargis in 2008, Myanmar’s military rulers did at least call for international help this time, and various countries stepped up to offer it: the relief workers Limaye observed at the Buddhist academy were from India; Chinese workers, too, have dragged survivors from ruins (and, apparently, filmed their exploits for the world to see).

One country that would normally be on the front lines, however, has been conspicuous by its absence: the US, which pledged some financial assistance, but hasn’t delivered much of anything else amid the sweeping recent cuts to its aid budget. According to press reports, only three US workers have entered Myanmar since the quake—and they were told they were being fired while they were on the ground.

The earthquake is the first big natural disaster to strike overseas since the new Trump administration started gutting USAID, and can thus be seen as the first real-time test of the policy’s effects.

But the USAID cuts were already being felt in Myanmar—not least among the country’s remaining independent media outlets, which mostly now operate out of exile in Thailand and beyond, and have been increasingly dependent, in recent years, on an ever-dwindling pool of international donations.

Indeed, that independent media landscape has recently been hit by a triple whammy—the USAID cuts, the Trump administration’s gutting of overseas US broadcasters, and, now, the quake—that has exacerbated a situation that was already hugely difficult, amid a war on press freedom waged by the junta.

“If you look at the first day or two of coverage, everything was about what happened in Thailand and not what happened in Myanmar, just because it was so much harder to get the news out” from the quake-affected areas in the latter country, Thin Lei Win, a journalist from Myanmar who covered the aftermath of Nargis in 2008 and went on to cofound the highly respected news site Myanmar Now, told me yesterday. “Journalists in those areas were already operating in an extremely challenging environment. Now they also have to go around trying to gather news without giving themselves away. And, of course, some newsrooms suddenly find themselves without enough staff to cover it, because they’ve had to let go of people because of the cuts. It’s just one problem compounding the other.”

In recent years, I’ve done a lot of reporting on Myanmar’s media landscape for a book, What Is Journalism For? (The book is out today, though I wrapped up my reporting last summer, long before the Trump cuts and the earthquake.)

In the book, I trace the rich history of press freedom in what is now Myanmar—the country is believed to be the first in its region to have enshrined the value into law without it being imposed by outsiders; indeed, it did so in the face of British colonial censorship—and how it first flowered, but then foundered after the country achieved independence after World War II, with military rulers imposing strict prepublication censorship amid other harshly repressive measures.

Journalists in the country often probed these boundaries and continued to cover everyday problems and major events like Nargis alike, albeit in coded terms or undercover or, often, out of exile; by the early 2010s, the country’s media landscape was “vibrant” if “significantly restricted,” as the authors of the book Myanmar Media in Transition put it.

Around that time, the country’s rulers began opening up, and conditions for the media improved in the following decade as Myanmar transitioned toward democracy. Even this period, however, was highly imperfect, with even champions of democracy—the once-celebrated civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi chief among them—often failing to live up to lofty ideals as far as press freedom was concerned.

Then, in 2021, the military seized power again and quickly crushed independent media, driving many outlets into exile and imprisoning many of the journalists left behind. (As of December, Myanmar was still the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists, by one count.)

After a rise in the 2010s, Reporters Without Borders now once again ranks Myanmar as one of the ten worst places on earth for press freedom. Sources often fear talking to reporters for fear of punishment by the junta. Even reaching people inside the country can be hard due to widespread internet outages and an official crackdown on the open Web. And the country has descended into a dangerous civil war, with rebel groups fighting the junta, and the junta brutally hitting back.

Amid all this, many independent outlets—from bigger broadcasters that sprang up in exile during the previous period of military rule to smaller outfits serving ethnic-minority communities in Myanmar’s borderlands—have, once again, continued to report.

Toe Zaw Latt told me while I was reporting my book that his outlet, Mizzima, had adopted a “one foot in, one foot out” strategy since the coup, with reporters inside Myanmar sending information to staffers in Thailand for production.

Meanwhile, a new generation of citizen journalists, known locally as “CJs,” joined the fray, driven by a desire to inform the world of the country’s plight under the junta; Aye Chan Naing, the chief editor of the major broadcaster Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), said one year on from the coup that it was as if “the whole country has become a journalist.” And yet there have been sharp questions as to the sustainability of all this: over CJs’ journalistic professionalism, but also their meager pay and, sometimes, exploitation by bosses.

I ended my book by writing about how the coup had hugely hampered a burgeoning, if again imperfect, process by which independent outlets were developing commercial strategies to stand on their own feet, driving up their reliance on donor funding from overseas. Over time, I heard repeatedly, this funding had begun to diminish, as Myanmar’s coup faded from global headlines and other global crises kicked off.

The USAID cuts earlier this year thus continued an existing trend—and yet they nonetheless came as a shock, Thin Lei Win told me yesterday. “People weren’t naive; they knew with the Trump administration that there could be changes,” she said, but the cuts came down suddenly and at the end of a month, immediately affecting many newsrooms’ ability to pay their staff; since then, Thin Lei Win has spoken with more than a dozen newsrooms, “and they’re all affected, in one form or another.” (In addition to USAID, Myanmar’s media has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, whose funding has likewise been slashed by the new administration; NED is suing to get the funds flowing again.)

In the immediate aftermath, Toe Zaw Latt predicted to The Guardian that two hundred or so journalists, who were already poorly paid, would be affected; since then, the impact seems to have ranged from tangible to crippling depending on the outlet, even if Thin Lei Win isn’t aware of any that have yet shuttered outright.

Aye Chan Naing, of DVB, told me last week that US funding made up 15 to 20 percent of the broadcaster’s budget, and that the cuts caused it to reduce staffing and scrap programs focused on countering Buddhist-extremist propaganda, mental health, and helping people to build bomb shelters, among other things. And yet “we’re, in a way, lucky,” he said. Thanks to funding from European countries, “we won’t fall apart.”

In addition to the US funding for domestic outlets in Myanmar, America’s own international broadcasters, namely the Burmese services of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, have made a significant imprint on the country’s independent media sector.

These broadcasters were a crucial source of independent news during Myanmar’s previous period under military rule, so much so that its rulers published regular newspaper notices and even books in an attempt to trash their reporting; since the 2021 coup, they have reprised something like this role, gaining a wide following on Facebook—still a crucial source of independent news, despite various junta efforts to curb internet access—but also remaining available via shortwave radio, a particularly important resource for people in areas where the internet is unreliable or who don’t have access to VPNs to circumvent Web blockages.

Last month, however, the Trump administration turned its ax on overseas broadcasting; according to The Irrawaddy, VOA’s Burmese service went dark while RFA’s struggled on, but with greatly reduced programming and resources. (Ye Naing Moe, a senior journalist and journalism teacher from Myanmar, told me that a top editor at RFA was reduced to reading news bulletins.)

A listener told The Irrawaddy that they feel “incomplete” without the broadcasters’ regular news updates. The junta, by contrast, is reportedly delighted, hailing an end to “years of divisive foreign propaganda that fueled unrest and weakened national unity.” (There has also been concern that the cuts to the broadcasters will further endanger their journalists who are in jail overseas—including Sithu Aung Myint, a VOA contributor arrested in Myanmar in 2021.)

Late last month, Phil Thornton, a veteran journalist in the region, wrote in a blog post for the International Federation of Journalists that exiled independent journalists were working to support colleagues who had lost their jobs by, for example, donating dried fish, beans, and rice. Lynn Zay, a journalist coordinating the aid deliveries, told Thornton that now is the worst time to be a media worker that he’s experienced in nineteen years in the profession; Thornton also reported a broad frustration that the international media is ignoring Myanmar’s struggles, despite their global significance.

Two days after his post was published, the earthquake hit. Again, reporting has carried on; Nyein Nyein Naing, a journalist from Myanmar, told me that colleagues inside the country have gotten news out while working undercover, despite themselves being affected by the quake. But, as Thin Lei Win noted, all the recent problems have compounded.

Ye Naing Moe told me that there are simply not enough experienced journalists left inside Myanmar to adequately cover all of the damage due to the junta’s repression; Burmese journalists wishing to come back risk arrest or even, perhaps, conscription into the military; foreign media have struggled to get in; even though the BBC reached Mandalay, reports from more remote areas near the epicenter have been sparse—not least because, on top of everything else, the internet and electricity have gone down.

The shortwave radio backup offered by VOA and RFA in those areas has been gutted. Without it, Aye Chan Naing said, “people are kind of living in the dark.”

The world is, at least, paying attention to Myanmar again because of the quake—but as Thin Lei Win told me yesterday, this has already started to taper off, with Trump’s tariffs now dominating the global news agenda.

When I asked her if the quake could at least trigger an uptick in international donations to Myanmar’s media scene—if not from the US—she allowed that it was possible, but didn’t sound optimistic; “the medium- to short-term focus is going to be on humanitarian aid,” she said, “and we will only really notice what happened to exile media once we stop getting news, and we realize we don’t know what’s going on in Myanmar.”

More generally, she doesn’t see other countries rushing to pick up the slack left by the US, even though, she noted, it would be in their self-interest to do so—funding Myanmar’s independent media is a cost-effective way for foreign diplomats to keep tabs on what’s happening there. There’s a risk of a “vicious cycle,” she said: “no funding, no news, and therefore no interest.”

News about the effects of the quake is, at least, continuing to trickle out of Myanmar, albeit below the toplines of the global news cycle. Those affected have sometimes been quoted anonymously in such reports, fearing reprisals from the junta should they speak openly, but several, including immediate family members of those missing or deceased, spoke on the record with Limaye, of the BBC; Nan Sin Hein, whose son was trapped in a collapsed building, for example, said that she wanted aid workers “to do everything they can to find his body,” even if he was already dead.

Aye Chan Naing told me that DVB’s reporters on the ground are being “discreet,” covering their own faces and not showing those of interviewees. But in general, people “are speaking freely, because they’re angry” and “want to share their suffering,” he said. “They lost everything, right? They have nothing to lose anymore.”

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today.

The Columbia Journalism Review is a biannual magazine for professional journalists that has been published by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961.