4/5/22, 3:23 PM Hate speech, atrocities and fake news: the crisis in Myanmar | Financial Times As the violence in the country spread, arguments broke out at the paper. Some of the foreign staff complained about the lack of Rohingya sources and the commissioning of stories that focused on Buddhists and Hindus uprooted in the violence, rather than the Rohingya. “It was a sad realisation to see people who fought so long for freedom were on the wrong side of something that would now define the history of the country going forward,” one of the expat former editors, speaking anonymously, told me. (Three out of four of the publication’s English copy editors quit over a short period last autumn.) I interviewed Ye Ni, the editor of the Burmese edition, who signed off on the controversial “Me First” cartoon. “I understand the message that the cartoonist wants to say: Myanmar is a very fragile country with many other issues — civil war, economic development — not only the Rohingya issue.” He said that editors were doing their part to eliminate hate speech in reader comments. “Since 2012, they accused The Irrawaddy of being pro-Muslim . . . pro-Rohingya, national traitors because of our coverage of the conflict. We never changed.” The publication isn’t alone in taking a more patriotic tone; other Burmese news sites with which it competes, including Mizzima and DVB, run coverage that often reflects a nationalist mindset. “The Irrawaddy’s reluctance to challenge the government narrative on the Rohingya crisis is very disappointing, but it represents a much broader failure of the pro-democracy movement — both inside and outside the NLD — to honour human rights principles in the face of dehumanising narratives of ‘illegal immigration’ and terrorism,” Ben Dunant, a former English-language editor, told me. The paper, he took pains to add, remains “a relatively moderate voice on the crisis” in Rakhine, and has done “great work” in reporting on military abuses in other parts of Myanmar. https://www.ft.com/content/2003d54e-169a-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44 13/19