24 Brooten, McElhone and Venkiteswaran communal watching was common. Western news reports and video footage of NLD or other protest rallies were keenly-sought-after items (Smith 1991). In the years following the 1988 protests, media continued to be used as tools in the struggle for power. Shortly after assuming control in 1988, the SLORC began signing ceasefire agreements with as many ethnic minority groups as it could, and the discourse and promise of peace and development in the ethnic regions became especially prevalent in state-run media (Brooten 2003). The NLD won elections in 1990 but was prevented from assuming power. Many of its leaders were subsequently arrested or went into exile, and the military retained its rule of the country. In 1995, in a largely symbolic but devastating blow to the ethnic opposition, the Burmese military captured the ethnic minority alliance headquarters at Manerplaw, just across the border from Ban Tha Song Yang in northwestern Thailand, a hub for visiting journalists and dignitaries meeting with opposition ethnic nationalist leaders (Brooten 2003). The hub then shifted to the Thai town of Mae Sot, across the Karen State border. The 1988 coup had little effect on media already being published in the ethnic-controlled rural areas, home to myriad opposition forces, yet it spawned other media, including outlets established by students who had fled the country (Brooten 2003; Smith 1991). Opposition ethnic minority radio stations emerged intermittently. Several writers and journalists who fled the country established writers and artists clubs in the “liberated area” of the border, and they began publishing magazines that offered an important forum for young writers and cartoonists (Smith 1991). And while media produced in exile rarely made it to Rangoon, opposition groups did manage to smuggle information into the country periodically in order to counteract the regime’s media representations of the opposition activists and the various ethnic nationality groups and to raise awareness of the plight of ethnic minorities in rural areas (Brooten 2003; Smith 1991). During the 1990s the emergence of private monthly magazines was an important development, starting with business-oriented magazines that told stories of Burmese living abroad that would not have previously been allowed (Allott 1993). These magazines featured articles, cartoons, poems, foreign news features and eye-catching photographs, 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 24 8/4/19 10:29 am