Jon Allsop writes for the Columbia Journalism Review, editing its flagship “Media Today” newsletter. He also writes widely about politics and other topics for publications including the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, N+1, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and The Intercept.

His new book ‘What is Journalism For?’ examines the role played by media in Myanmar during the decade of democratic transition until it came to an end with the 2021 military coup.

At this point, most journalists either fled underground or went into exile. Allsop speaks to several Myanmar journalists, including DVB Chief Editor Aye Chan Naing, to find out how independent media can survive from exile.

DVB: Why did you decide to include the recent history of Myanmar media as a focus of your book What is Journalism for?

For context, the book is part of a wider series that’s being published by Bristol University Press in the U.K., asking what the purpose of various social institutions is in this turbulent global moment. (Other titles range from What are Prisons For? to What is Veganism For?)

Since 2017, I’ve covered the world of journalism, mostly in the U.S. but with a global lens, for the Columbia Journalism Review, a New York City-based magazine; in 2022, an editor at Bristol University Press reached out to me and asked if I’d like to tackle the “journalism” edition in the series.

I say all this to establish that I wasn’t so insane as to try and answer such a huge question as “What is journalism for?” off my own bat, with no prompting. But I quickly realized I’d been circling this really big question in my work for a long time, and was interested in trying to articulate an answer at book-length.

Obviously, when answering a question this big, there’s a risk of doing so in an overly abstract or philosophical way, so I knew straight away that I wanted to anchor my answer, to make the stakes tangible for readers, using real-world examples—not as case studies in any strict academic sense (even though the publisher is a university press, this isn’t an academic book), but to illustrate the importance of journalism in a global way.

I knew that I would draw on the U.S., which has been the main focus of my work, and the U.K., where I’m from, but it was also important to me to step beyond that comfort zone and challenge my ideas by situating them in a less Western-centric, international perspective.

I quickly had the idea to focus on Myanmar as a way of doing that: I had written about press freedom in the country a couple of times for the Columbia Journalism Review in the wake of the 2021 coup; not in a ton of detail, but enough to know that the story of journalism in Myanmar is a fascinating one, involving democratic advances and retreats, profound, sometimes violent tensions in the relationship that journalists are supposed to have with their communities (a key theme of the book), and now, of course, intense state repression.

I also hoped that writing about Myanmar would bring some small measure of focus to the crisis in the country and the challenges that the mostly exiled media have faced in covering it. All of this got quite a lot of global attention in the months after the coup, but it later tailed off, with concrete consequences, among other things, for donor funding for exiled outlets. It’s a story that deserves more attention.

DVB: Since the 2021 military coup, independent Myanmar media outlets have operated from exile. How did the journalists you spoke to for the book respond to this challenge?

I spoke with a range of journalists with experience working in different parts of Myanmar’s vibrant independent media landscape: spanning generations, big outlets (like DVB) and smaller ones that serve ethnic communities, people inside and outside the country (though mostly the latter).

I obviously couldn’t speak to everyone I might have wanted to, and the language barrier was an obstacle for me, so my sample of interviewees was not fully comprehensive or representative; that said, I’m full of admiration for those with whom I spoke and their colleagues, who have continued to cover the crisis inside Myanmar through almost unimaginably difficult circumstances.

Those still inside the country, including a growing class of citizen journalists (CJs), are feeding out information despite the direct danger of official reprisal; those outside are having to navigate distanced relationships with sources, internet outages in parts of Myanmar, and other challenges that clearly make the basic journalistic task of finding and verifying information really hard, while at the same time often having their own lives turned upside down and trying to build new ones outside their home country.

Understandably, this state of affairs has posed journalistic difficulties—I heard concerns about journalistic professionalism and independence; different journalists seem to have different views as to what extent it’s allowable to side with the resistance to the junta given that the junta has waged war on democracy and journalism.

(Those with whom I spoke mostly stressed the importance of maintaining a posture of critical independence and not taking sides, but when one “side” is frontally attacking you, lines can get blurred—not only in Myanmar, but in other countries, including, increasingly, the U.S.; even if the situation there is clearly much less extreme than in Myanmar, some of these same philosophical questions are rearing their head.)

There have also been disappointing reports of abusive or underpaid working conditions for journalists. But on the whole, the persistence and dedication of those who have tried to continue reporting has been inspiring.

DVB: In an op-ed for the Columbia Journalism Review, you called the U.S. President Donald Trump’s gutting of USAID, U.S. broadcasters’ Burmese language services Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and the March 28 earthquake a “triple whammy.” Could you explain what you meant by this?

I simply meant that these were three further huge challenges for Myanmar’s independent media community that struck in very quick succession in the first part of this year: the cuts to USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) hit the budgets of independent outlets that have increasingly relied on foreign aid funding, in a context of existing broader pullback in that funding from actors globally; then, the Trump administration moved to gut U.S.-funded overseas broadcasters, which have long been an important source of news in Myanmar, especially during the periods of authoritarian rule; then, the earthquake happened, which obviously personally affected journalists inside the country or who still have family there, and also was an urgent story that needed to be reported out to the world.

These new challenges compounded the existing ones: the earlier crackdown on the free press, for example, obviously meant that there were fewer journalists inside Myanmar to cover the quake because so many of them had gone into exile and made it dangerous for journalists inside the country and their sources to speak candidly about the disaster and the official response for fear of reprisals though some nonetheless did so.

The new challenges also intersected with each other: VOA and RFA, for example, broadcast on shortwave radio, which is vital when the internet goes down, which happened after the quake, but obviously by that point those outlets were struggling to stay on the air, if they were able to at all, thanks to Trump.

As Thin Lei Win, the co-founder of Myanmar Now, put it to me at the time, journalists in the areas affected by the quake “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.”

DVB: Several countries around the world have had independent media forced into exile, but what is it about Myanmar independent media that makes it a case study for a book on journalism and democracy? 

Any number of countries’ exiled media communities could have made for interesting and important examples—sadly, as you note, there are many of them these days—but I find Myanmar’s particularly fascinating. You have a vibrant, centuries-old history of press freedom—one that was institutionalized in novel ways by local rulers, not imposed by colonial powers—followed by a brutal crackdown following the 1962 coup, followed by a period of opening and hope in the 2010s, followed by another brutal crackdown in 2021, so you really get to trace how press freedom responds to political conditions in quite a dynamic way.

And that seemingly simple timeline is nuanced in many respects: the crackdowns didn’t kill press freedom, it just forced the forms it took to mutate; on the flip side, the transition toward democracy in the 2010s was by no means a perfect period for press freedom, and you see figures—like Aung San Suu Kyi, previously such a darling of global democrats—treating the press in ways that fell short of their lofty rhetoric.

It’s a country that has a rich tradition of things like cartoons and satire; it’s also a phenomenally diverse country, and that is very visible in its journalistic history: in positive ways—like the growth of ethnic media that are really responsive to their communities’ needs, and in some cases help keep traditions and languages alive—but also very sad ones, as could be seen in the media tensions that surrounded the Rohingya crisis in the late 2010s.

My book explores the purpose of journalism in the abstract, as a means of identifying and reporting what is true about the world and holding power to account, but also explores how the idea of journalism can be pushed and pulled by different community interests, or the appeal of activism, or other institutions around it in society, and to what extent these different influences can be embraced or need to be rejected. Myanmar I think shines a very important and distinctive light on almost every aspect of this. 

It’s also an example that pushes back on the oversimplified idea that what it means to be a journalist, or how journalists think of their jobs, differs by country, or between the West and everywhere else, particularly when it comes to how aggressively journalists ought to hold the government to account. There surely are some cultural differences, but as Thin Lei Win told me for the book, repressive conditions in Myanmar have bred generations of “seriously good muckraking journalists” who “really want to find out what is behind policies and decisions.”

And in recent decades in particular, Myanmar’s independent media community has developed in close contact with partners and funders from other countries, showing that journalism in one country never exists in a hermetically sealed bubble without any outside influence. I make the point in the book that if journalists are obligated to serve their communities, they must recognize the porous boundaries between communities, and the fact that in this day and age, all communities are part of an inseparable global whole. Journalists themselves form a global community.

DVB: What can media practitioners, academics, students or anyone interested in Myanmar learn from its independent media and journalists?

A huge amount about the country, clearly, but I’d say first and foremost the power—and costs—of journalistic resilience. It’s become a truism that press freedom is in a precarious state worldwide, and that there is a need to fight for it. And this is true. But for many people, the notion of the fight is still abstract or distant. In Myanmar it’s real. Journalists from there are living it. And it’s relentless.

DVB: Thank you.