Myanmar Media Historically and the Challenges of Transition 9 business owners hailed from the military or had close ties with top generals and access to capital and ownership during the time of the junta. Since the country’s wave of privatization began in 2008, a new class of oligarchs has emerged that benefited from the earlier patronage of the military, and while they are characterized to a certain degree by political clientelism, they are becoming increasingly autonomous from the political elites and consolidating their own economic power (Ford, Gillan and Htwe Htwe Thein 2016). Functioning as agents of stability, these oligarchs and their media promote the status quo in order to preserve their own footing in the media landscape. The growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of these oligarchs and cronies across Asia has had a negative impact on public participation in political processes (Tapsell 2015). In addition, clientelistic systems have become entwined in an increasingly interconnected global media network. Flew, Iosifidis and Steemers (2016) argue that in this context the role of states has shifted from controlling the media — a key feature in oppressive environments — to managing, coordinating and facilitating developments through the regulatory framework, and sharing power, to varying degrees, with the corporate sector, international bodies and civil society, as well as with the emerging media oligarchs. Another potentially useful concept is the “new despotisms”, a “new spectre” greatly entangled with democracies by doing business with them, selling arms to them, negotiating alliances with them, and mimicking them by experimenting with democratic practices (Keane 2015, p. 249). Keane (2015) defines despotism as “top-down, vertically organized power structured by interconnected patrons and clients” in which both benefit, but under “asymmetries of power” in which “things are stacked in favour of the more powerful” (p. 251). Contemporary despotisms are “governing arrangements mixed with concentrations of private capital” that expand their power through misinformation and spin that threaten actual or emerging democracies (p. 249). The media employed in such a project construct a rhetoric of change while functioning as agents of stability by reinforcing the status quo of power relations. They employ the rhetoric of democracy and make reference to “the people”, embracing “the institutional facades of electoral democracy”, while excluding undesirable candidates and 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 9 8/4/19 10:29 am