When President Thein Sein pardoned over 300 political prisoners last week in Burma, CPJ reported that at least nine journalists were among those released. Since then, the exile-run Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) has announced that all of its jailed reporters, including a group of eight who had remained anonymous, are now free.
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When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets this week with Burmese President Thein Sein, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and senior ranking members of the military establishment, she conspicuously will not have the opportunity to meet with journalist Sithu Zeya.
Sithu was detained by police after recording the impact of a bomb that exploded in a crowded Burmese marketplace in April 2010. The journalist was sentenced to 17 years in prison on charges related specifically to his reporting activities, with an additional 10 years tacked on this year -- soon after Thein Sein announced his intention to increase media freedom in Burma.
CPJ and other Burma watchers are monitoring the announcements of the unfolding prisoner release closely. As a press freedom organization, we've focused most closely on the fate of the 14 journalists we counted in jail in Shawn Crispin's report, "In Burma, transition neglects press freedom" that we posted on September 20. In our alert today we welcomed the release of Burmese blogger and comedian Maung Thura, bringing that number down to 13, and there's a chance the number might even be lower.
From Paris to Bangkok, London to Geneva, the Free Burma VJ campaign will stage protests in front of Burmese embassies on Friday to call for the immediate release of 17 jailed video journalists working for the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a leading Burmese exile media organization. The campaign began less than two months after Burma's new government was sworn in, supposedly hailing the beginning of Burma's transition to civilian rule. But DVB is not alone in thinking that the ongoing incarceration of journalists, who are among the nearly 2,000 political prisoners in Burma, is a sign that little has changed since the ostensible end to military rule.
Burma's newly installed democratic government has sent tentative signals that it intends to allow for more media openness as the country transitions from military to civilian rule. The continued detention of more than 2,100 political prisoners, including as many as 25 journalists, however, belies President Thein Sein's recent press-promoting pronouncements.
Like other Burmese exile-run media, the Irrawaddy has been plagued by numerous denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in recent years that have forced its website to be shut down. Now, Aung Zaw, the publication's founder and editor, believes Burma's military-backed regime has adopted a new cyber-attack strategy that aims to undermine the exile media's credibility among readers.
New York’s Grand Central Station is a gathering point today for people who are coming into town from a little farther away than usual: Burmese dissidents, writers, monks, and musicians are convening to protest the military junta of Senior General Than Shwe. Human Rights Watch has organized a petition and an art and photo installation in Vanderbilt Hall that includes "saffron revolution" monks coming in by train from 
At a Tuesday meeting of the International Freedom to Publish
Committee (a publishing industry group dedicated to free expression) in New
York, Maureen Aung-Thwin handed out pages from Flower News, a Rangoon-based newspaper that had been marked up
by Burmese government censors. Burma is the world’s second most censored
country, according to a 2006 CPJ report. But
you don’t have to read Burmese to understand what’s going on here. The red
marks speak for themselves. Aung-Thwin is the director of the Burma project at the Open
Society Institute and one of the world’s leading experts on that country. A basement in the
gray, Gothic heart of the
PBS's "Wide Angle" aired "Eyes
of the Storm" last week, a documentary on Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath.
Like Anders Ostergaard's recent film "Burma
VJ" on citizen reporters during the monk-led protests in 2007, which
we wrote about in April,
"Wide Angle" contrasts independent reports filmed at great risk with the junta's
state media claims that aid was under control.
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