Bibliographic record
Abstract
En. Throughout over fifty years of stringent censorship, Burma’s ethnic media, exiled news agencies, citizen journalists, bloggers and even state-sanctioned periodicals revealed a surprising level of diversity and dialogue coursing beneath the surface of state control. Today, under the promise of legislative reform, this diverse media activity stands at a historical crossroads, with underground and exiled prac- titioners returning to above-ground production inside Burma. This article describes percep- tions of risk during the years of the dictatorship from the journalists’ points of view, and why they continued their work under threat of incarceration, exile, and death. The article then examines the historical context that led to journalists’ prominent place in Burma’s demo- cratic struggles. Finally, it contemplates the future risks they and their work may face in the new environment, and proffers some aspects for the international community to consider. After decades of struggle, a move to civilian government has created an opening for media organizations to surface above ground and/or to return from exile. However, the position of journalism is far from secure. Journalists are still subject to arrest and harassment, and still face danger in areas where armed conflict continues and Burma Army soldiers operate far from central control. Amid an uncertain transition to civilian rule, there are no tidy endings to the story. As well, the landscape has opened up for Western powers to export their own vision of commercial/corporate media practice in the name of ‘democratic development,’ without regard to already-successful indigenous journalism structures and methods. Within this overall context, I will argue that without a complete grasp of the diversity and strength of existing grassroots media, there is a danger that international media development assis- tance may blunt the edge of a style of risk-taking journalism that unabashedly holds power to account, and that seeks social justice, not profit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".