On the first day of Bucknell’s spring semester in 2021, I received a shocking piece of news. My country, Burma, had undergone a coup yet again. It wasn’t the first time the military had taken over, the last one happened in 1962, only about sixty years before. We’d enjoyed a period of peace for nine years when the military agreed to a sham democracy, laid with condition upon condition in the constitution of Burma in order to maintain power.
As a child, I remember having a vague awareness of being under tyranny. There were a lot of things that were restricted, information being the most precious. The resistance then was online blogs. The military had heavily restricted the internet, but had in western media and books, surprisingly. I remember censorship being a large part of my life, especially with the internet being restricted.
As an adult now, facing the news of the coup, I am most interested in the information available this time round. ,In this age of high-speed internet and mobile penetration around the world, the landscape of media has changed. Facebook has risen to be “the internet” in Myanmar, and activism and accountability has never been easier to organize.
For my independent study, I have chosen to analyze two newspapers regarding their coverage of the coup. The first newspaper is The Irrawaddy, a local news outlet that publishes content in English and Burmese, but is ultimately a local establishment, deeply rooted in Burma and the daily happenings of the coup. The second one is the Voice of America, an international outlet that has strong connections to Myanmar. When we would secretly listening to the radio when I was younger, The Voice of America was definitely the choice station, so much that the military propaganda there specifically mentioned it first among its list the organizations that were trying to tear apart national unity.
For the project, I gathered all the news articles that I could from February and March from these two sources that pertained to the coup. I wanted to analyze them and see how different coverage was for each outlet, and try to figure out what they highlighted by using Voyant, particularly the trends and contexts tool for close and distant readings, and the links tool to find associations, and exploring some of the relevant entities and events through the lens of these two outlets.