Similarly in Nay Pyi Taw, the broadcasting services stopped on the first day, while the staff were in shock and locked out of the building. Within a few days, the stations were back on-air with a skeleton staff, but guarded with security forces. The newly-appointed Minister for Information — who has a military background — gave the instruction to all newsrooms to collaborate with the new administration. To silence parallel voices, the junta decided to shut down other TV channels. All these earliest actions lent weight to the army’s textbook strategy in making the coup effective. To shape public opinion around the coup in the following weeks, the MOI shrank MRTV’s editorial space and allowed it to broadcast only the content that aligned with the promotion of the regime’s agenda, while many of the usual broadcasts were suspended. For prime-time news, MRTV could no longer produce its own news content as the military-owned station, Myawaddy TV, intervened in its editorial decisions and came to dictate all the announcements to be presented in line with the coup leaders’ plan. Operation of the state-run media was considerably weakened when the journalists and non-journalist staff there joined the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) to show their solidarity with staff from other ministries. According to Mizzima News, nearly 350 staff from the MOI were participating in the CDM in March and February 2021.19 In response, the military have been using multiple ‘carrot and stick’ methods to try to bring those involved in the CDM back to work. As 20 percent of the total staff from the state-run TV stations were participating in the CDM, it was a significant blow to the normal operations of the major broadcasters.20 The viewers noticed that even the quality of weather reports declined due to lack of competent staff. Yet, the labour strike does not stamp out the authoritarian elements of the media ecosystem, and the state-run channels remain the dominant presence, with the highest coverage all over the country. Meanwhile, the junta increased restrictions to block people’s access to information. It was announced that satellite television used by private media such as Mizzima and Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) lacked a legal operating license. The MOI announced that whoever violated the television and video law, especially people using satellite dishes, shall be punished with one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 kyat (320 USD). It targeted DVB and Mizzima directly, as they had kept streaming the news from outside of the country by using a foreign satellite. Residents in towns and villages were instructed by local authorities to stop using these satellite dishes, as news from abroad supposedly threatened national security. However, it did not stop viewers across the country. The forbidden dishes were re-installed as soon as the law enforcement bodies went away, but the locals have to live in constant fear if they wish to gain access to such information. IMPACT OF THE COUP ON PRINT MEDIA AND THE ROLE OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS As media practitioners predicted, the neglect to reform has been weakening the sustainability of independent media. While more resources have been channelled to the state-owned media sector over the past ten years, the private media outlets, including print and digital outlets, were already very weak when COVID-19 hit. The independent media outlets even accused the MOI of monopolizing the advertising market, instead of encouraging the expansion of the media’s financial resilience. Since such policies have weakened the profitability of private media, the number of private newspapers in the market has shrunk from 16 to only five within the last eight years. The media’s capacity to operate even reached a new low and no newspaper could run as a daily as of mid-February 2021. For two weeks in February, Myanmar became a nation without newspapers until the Standard came back to the newsstands in March 2021.21 After the coup leaders gave a warning that they would take legal action against journalists who presented views that did not meet the military’s approval, a career as a journalist became more precarious, requiring safety equipment, safe places, and security training in order to be able to continue their work in a time of crisis. In the case of arrest, they would also need legal advice and financial support. It also marked the end of domestic news production for many media outlets when the MOI revoked 19 Some stories have been taken offline, but Mizzima has continued to report throughout via its Facebook page, available here: https://www.facebook.com/MizzimaDaily/. 20 “We do not hate our office. We just want to end the dictatorship”, BBC Burmese, 13 February 2021, available at https://www.facebook.com/ watch/?v=750759972221431. 21 To use its full title, the Standard Time Daily has been published in Myanmar since 2013. See: http://sdtimedaily.com/. 8