Myanmar's media from an audience perspective / 11 Issues with access “We don’t buy and read newspapers in this village. We get the news only from radio and television.” (29-years-old woman from rural Rakhine) Whether or not people have access to the necessary technologies and distributionchannels has, perhaps not surprisingly, a big influence on people’s media habits. Television relies on tv-sets and electricity; radio relies on transmitters and electricity; online and social media rely on either computer and internet access or smartphone and 3G connections; and, printed newspapers rely on sales points and physical roads for distribution. People living in more remote areas have a much more limited palette of choices when it comes to available media. Even if they wanted to read a printed newspaper more frequently or use social media it might not be an option. People therefore end up using the media that they have access to – as well as media that they know. With the media landscape having evolved so rapidly, people may not be aware of the media they actually have access to. This finding was highlighted by an exercise from the focus group discussions where participants were asked to sort cards with the names and logos of a wide variety of available media in Myanmar printed on them. The cards were to be sorted based on different questions such as preferences and trust. Observing the exercise, it was evident that the recognition of the available media in Myanmar is low. Particularly in rural areas, people have limited knowledge of the country’s media landscape and only knew a handful of the media they were presented with – despite some of them being quite local in scope and thereby within reach of the participants. In some focus groups, participants even ended up thanking the research team for introducing them to so many new media that they had never heard of. Cards presenting different media were sorted according to trust and relevance in all focus group discussions. The image above presents the results from a discussion on the most relevant media by the female-only focus group in rural Rakhine. Photo by EMReF.