Myanmar Media Historically and the Challenges of Transition 43 several days for Facebook to take action. The civil society groups in Myanmar who initially identified and reported this incident sent an open letter to Zuckerberg, criticizing Facebook’s over-reliance on third parties, absence of a proper mechanism for emergency escalation, reticence to engage local stakeholders around systemic solutions, and lack of transparency (Phandeeyar et al. 2018). While Facebook is reportedly continuing efforts to improve its ability to respond to notifications of abuse and to monitor and remove hate speech proactively (Facebook, 15 August 2018), civil society activists remain unconvinced that the company’s commitment to improving the situation and ending the resulting violence is on par with its commitment to improving its own reputation. Capturing the complex and fast-moving Rakhine and Rohingya situation and the media’s response to it has been one of the more challenging aspects of compiling this volume. Assembling This Volume Assembling Myanmar Media in Transition presented many challenges, notably the concern that the information would become outdated by the time of publication. Events and decisions are unfolding rapidly as we pen this introductory chapter, especially involving legal cases against the media and other civil society actors, as well as developments in the Rakhine and Rohingya crisis. But we must at some point stop updating and acknowledge that this work, like all works, is partial. We offer this volume as a panoramic snapshot of the Myanmar media landscape at this point in time, with a level of detail and depth useful as a baseline for building comparative research around the many themes raised. We discuss Myanmar media scholarship in greater detail in the Epilogue. A significant limitation facing us is that there are few media scholars focused on Myanmar. The country’s isolation during military rule had a direct impact on the kinds of research scholars were permitted to undertake, which has resulted in limited academic analysis of media. The academic literature that does exist is scattered and piecemeal. Information on ownership and cross-ownership of media, as well as informal agreements between parties that have characterized the media sector in the country, are difficult to come by. Myanmar journalists acknowledge that writing about media ownership brings with it the risk of criminal 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 43 8/4/19 10:29 am