8 Brooten, McElhone and Venkiteswaran work in other areas of media and communication practice” (Hallin and Mancini 2012, p. 259; see also Curran 2007; Hallin and Mancini 2004; Zeilonka 2015). Too often transition research ignores the role of the entertainment industries and pop culture and downplays the role of social groups, civil society groups and political parties, as well as the impact of ideology and globalization, moves that disconnect the research from the ways in which contemporary democracies work (Curran 2007; Heryanto 2008). More attention needs to be paid to the non-state and non-commercial efforts that also compel and propel change during transition, a gap Myanmar Media in Transition addresses. However, while avoiding state-centrism, we cannot ignore the important role of the state. The available models for thinking about the relationship between media and the state present both useful insights and limitations. State/Media Relationships Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) Polarized Pluralist Model has been both used and critiqued as a catch-all for societies outside of Europe and the Americas. It emphasizes political clientelism, “in which access to social resources is controlled by patrons and delivered to clients in exchange for deference and various forms of support”, and formal rules are less important than personal and political relationships (Hallin and Mancini 2004, p. 58). They note that clientelistic relationships exist to some degree everywhere, and are often the target of reform efforts. Clientelism tends to be associated with lower levels of professionalization, as journalists are integrated into the clientelist networks characterized by private rather than public forms of communication. The process of political communication thus tends to be closed and “to serve the process of negotiation among elites rather than providing information for the mass public”, while access to information for journalists tends to depend on their political ties (p. 59). Media that operate in this way function as agents of stability, maintaining the status quo. In Southeast Asia, clientelism is often indicated by the term “crony”, used to define business elites in countries across the region and their close association in many cases with authoritarian regimes, in particular since privatization in the 1980s and after the 1997 financial crisis. It is common to hear such references in Myanmar, where a class of 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 8 8/4/19 10:29 am