International Journal of Communication 13(2019) Extreme Speech in Myanmar 3211 groups concerned about their discriminatory nature. At the time, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said the bills “risk deepening discrimination against minorities and setting back women’s rights in Myanmar” (UNHCR, 2015, para. 2). Despite this, these proposals received overwhelming parliamentary support, and while not backed by National League for Democracy (NLD) lawmakers, the party has not rescinded these laws since coming to office after the 2015 national election. By 2017, the Rohingya lacked any meaningful domestic political support, with many in the country seemingly prepared to accept the appalling mistreatment of the group by the country’s military. The events in 2012 and the horrors of the Rohingya’s 2017 forced migration demonstrate how there can be devastating real-world consequences when extreme speech against groups like the Rohingya has been made acceptable and mainstreamed. Anti-Rohingya speech has played a central role in the creation of a political environment in Myanmar in which public opinion does not oppose rights abuses against the Rohingya. Although calls to regulate extreme speech in Myanmar have focused on nonstate actors’ use of online platforms like Facebook (Burrington, 2017; Hogan, 2018; McLaughlin, 2018), I argue that the state media, discussed in the next section, played an important role in the mainstreaming of anti-Rohingya narratives. Extreme Speech in Myanmar’s State Media: The Global New Light of Myanmar Despite criticism of nonstate actors’ use of extreme speech in Myanmar, and specific criticism of Facebook’s role in promoting it, the role of official Myanmar as an active contributor to the mainstreaming of anti-Rohingya speech and attitudes has been often overlooked. Although Myanmar nationalists have actively contributed to hostility toward the aspirations of groups like the Rohingya, the state has done this too. This is hardly surprising since official policies toward the Rohingya have, for decades, actively discriminated against the group, denying them citizenship and access to their human rights. In Myanmar, penalties for law breaking can be harsh, and under military rule, civilians have been jailed frequently for expressing opinions considered problematic by the authorities, a practice that continues today despite the media reforms of recent years (Allott, 1993; Fink, 2001). Human rights groups including Amnesty International and HRW suggest Myanmar’s legal framework simultaneously undermines those who might peacefully oppose nationalists’ extreme speech that echoes that of the authorities. Amnesty International documented this in its 2016 research report ���New Expression Meets Old Repression,” which highlighted incarcerations in Myanmar for peaceful protests and instances of jail terms for individuals accused of mocking the military on Facebook. In 2017, following a spate of arrests of peaceful political activists, HRW called for Myanmar’s authorities to repeal laws that allow criminal prosecutions for peaceful political speech (HRW, 2017a). In this context, Myanmar state media provides the country’s residents with an indication of what the authorities consider acceptable forms of expression and those that are unlikely to attract official sanction. Official media sets the tone for what is acceptable, and, as I show through a case study of the GNLM, this contributes to an environment that excuses and allows nationalist hate speech, particularly targeting the country’s Muslim Rohingya. Building on my extended research on this topic, I examined GNLM editions during, and immediately before, the 2017 Rohingya crisis as a case study of official extreme speech in Myanmar. State media