Myanmar Media Historically and the Challenges of Transition 7 formulate a “typology of hybrid regimes” (p. 247) is unhelpful “when it denotes a lump of features that the researcher does not know how to untangle” (p. 248). Suggesting that researchers focus on media agency, McCargo (2012) argues that modelling “systems” is problematic since “there are so many exceptions to every rule that rules tend to obscure rather than explain the nature of the game itself” (p. 202). Even those committed to theorizing them admit that “typologies” of democratic media, and their role in transitions, are often limited due to the unique circumstances of each national context (Hallin and Mancini 2004, 2012). Although there has been significant research into media’s role in political transitions, and several models developed, no overarching, coherent explanation that applies to all such cases has emerged. This is not particularly surprising, as the role of media in this process has proven to be highly contextual and varied. Reflecting on the case of Indonesia a decade after the fall of the authoritarian regime, Krishna Sen argues for “micro-level careful, empirical studies of media structures, regulations and practices” to explain how media operate in changing political environments (Sen 2011, p. 2). Since media generally defy ready classification, McCargo (2003, 2012) offers us a useful formulation, urging us to “see media outfits as polyvalent, speaking with forked or multiple tongues, and given to acting in apparently contradictory ways” (McCargo 2012, p. 202). He has offered a framework for understanding media as agents of stability that work to preserve the social order; agents of restraint that provide checks and balances on the political order; and agents of change that help shape political changes during times of instability or crisis (McCargo 2003). This approach also interrogates commonly used terms such as censorship, ownership and partisanship, and the assumption underlying much research that most media can be understood as business enterprises, which does not hold with local realities in several Asian countries (McCargo 2012). McCargo (2012) argues that the tendency to characterize some forms of media using terms such as “clientelism” or “instrumentalism” suggests that they are peripheral deviations, when they are actually far more common than we are led to believe and are perhaps even dominant patterns globally. Research on media and transition, like many discussions of media and politics, also tends to conflate media with journalism, mentioning only in passing, for example, that “similar processes have been at 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 7 8/4/19 10:29 am