3204 Ronan Lee International Journal of Communication 13(2019) authorities in Myanmar using state media. I argue that extreme speech by state actors using state media ought to be considered a major concern for policy making and scholarship. Article Structure Throughout this article, three separate methods are used: historical contextualization, interviews, and content analysis. Content analysis involves a case study examination of a Myanmar state media publication, the Global New Light of Myanmar (GNLM) newspaper, during the time immediately before and after the start of the 2017 Rohingya crisis. This provides an empirically rich source illustrating how the Rohingya have been denigrated in Myanmar’s official media. I argue that this has contributed to an environment where anti-Rohingya speech in other forms of media, notably through social media posts, is made acceptable and where rights abuses against the group do not elicit public sympathy. I use an extended discussion of the background to the Rohingya crisis, and of recent media liberalization in Myanmar, to contextualize my study and the unique sociopolitical dynamics around the Rohingya minority. This discussion is informed by in-depth ethnographic research I undertook in Myanmar and Bangladesh between November 2015 and November 2017. My research involved observation of Myanmar’s 2010 and 2015 elections and research with the Rohingya community, including more than 40 in-depth semistructured interviews. These interviews were undertaken with Rohingya community leaders in Myanmar and among the Rohingya diaspora living in Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Thailand, the UK, and the U.S. during 2015, 2016, and 2017 as well as with newly arrived Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh during 2017. Participant observations during more than a dozen visits to Myanmar, in Bangladesh refugee camps during the 2017 forced migration crisis, and among Rohingya diaspora leaders living farther from Myanmar also contributed to this research, which relied heavily on ethnographic methods of inquiry similar to those described by Skidmore (2003, 2004) for her Myanmar research. Before my examination of the GNLM, I examine the Myanmar context in which this research is undertaken, outlining the background and situation of Myanmar’s Rohingya. I focus on Myanmar’s recent transition from military-led government to a quasi-civilian administration and the effects of the policy liberalization that followed this transition. In particular, I consider the effects of the country’s recent media liberalization and how it has contributed to a rise in extreme speech against groups like the Rohingya by nonstate and state actors that has had devastating real-world consequences for the minoritized group. Much of media reporting about the consequences of extreme speech in Myanmar uses the term “hate speech” (Barron, 2018b; “Myanmar Rohingya,” 2018; Specia & Mozur, 2017). This is also a term routinely used by regulators and policy makers. In Myanmar, nationalists are understood as Buddhist nationalists, and their speech is often aggressively anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya. They appear to represent clear examples of the kinds of hate speech considered by A. Brown (2017); Cohen-Almagor (2015); Gagliardone, Gal, Alves, and Martinez (2015); and Waldron (2012). However, as Udupa and Pohjonen (2019; this Special Section) point out, “hate” is not a universal category, and using this term risks unintentional ambiguity. As a concept, “extreme speech” qualifies hate speech and better accounts for cultural variation and differing political contexts. This is a useful framework when considering speech in nonWestern contexts, such as in Myanmar. This is particularly useful in my analysis here of extreme speech acts by official Myanmar sources. If examined in isolation and without appreciation of their specific historical