In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy Photo credit: Jane McElhone as the foundation of Burma’s democratic transition. (This chapter will refer to the country as “Burma” except where the proper names of organizations require the use of “Myanmar.”) Introduction Soon after Burma’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning icon Aung San Suu Kyi1 led her party, the National League for Democracy, to power in 2016, her new government released nearly 300 political prisoners (Wa Lone 2016), including four journalists and the top executive of a now-defunct weekly, Unity Journal. Two years earlier they had been sentenced to 10 years with hard labor, later reduced to seven, for reporting on what they claimed was a secret chemical weapons factory run by Burma’s military, the Tatmadaw (Ye Mon 2014). The amnesty was acknowledged in The Irrawaddy’s 2016 World Press Freedom Day tribute: “This condition—prisons without journalists—is a low but important bar for any country assessing its press freedom. Subjected to decades of censorship and persecution, a new era has dawned for Burmese journalists, but work toward consolidating a truly free and independent press remains” (The Irrawaddy 2016). Unfortunately, such occasional signals of respect for a democratic approach to media have not proven to be consistent. Journalists and bloggers continue to face threats, intimidation and arrest when publishing critical views of the government and the military, according to watchdog groups such as PEN Myanmar, the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, Article 19, Human Rights Watch, and the Committee to Project Journalists. The dozens of criminal defamation cases that have been filed under Section 66(d) of Burma’s telecommunications law since the NLD assumed power in 2016, including by the military and the NLD, provide a 60