4/5/22, 3:23 PM Hate speech, atrocities and fake news: the crisis in Myanmar | Financial Times As the refugees continued to pour into Bangladesh — their number would reach nearly 700,000 by early 2018 — international outrage spread, and with it calls to censure Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader. But The Irrawaddy defended her. “Many groups and institutions in the West are humiliating Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as well as the country,” the site wrote in one of its many defiant editorials. Rather than training its attention on what US and UN officials called ethnic cleansing, the publication focused on what it claimed was biased foreign news coverage of the exodus, and printed cartoons that tapped into a surge in nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment. Human-rights advocates expressed disappointment and alarm. “The Irrawaddy have switched over and aligned themselves with the prevailing narrative; they used to be independent and strongly in favour of democracy,” Khin Zaw Win, one of the few political commentators in Myanmar to have bluntly criticised Aung San Suu Kyi’s government on the Rohingya and other issues, told me. “There is a struggle, a debate going on in the media, and the majority of the public feel this way.” This is not a story solely about the media, except to the extent that many stories these days are about media credibility, the manipulation of social media and the perils of false news reports, whether in Brexit Britain or Trump’s America. Nor is it solely about The Irrawaddy, except to the extent that it stands for an ideal of journalism and the deep sacrifices the Burmese population — including some of its own journalists — paid for their freedom. Instead it is about a moment when many of the democratic forces that successfully challenged military rule in Myanmar are closing ranks around a nationalist and apologist script that increasingly puts them at odds with the western world. A uniquely unsettling moment in the country’s history is playing out in the press and social media, where new internet freedoms have enabled both incisive journalism and the spread of hate speech and false reports. Some journalists have been arrested or received death threats. Others are preparing to leave. Myanmar’s estrangement from the west is deepening, as is its determination to tell its own story on its own terms — even when the facts don’t line up. https://www.ft.com/content/2003d54e-169a-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44 3/19