Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
the guidelines for all the news that was fit to report, and the Press
Scrutiny Board ensured that these were followed to the letter. Among
the prohibitions: no bad weather forecasts, or news of economic
downturns, or depictions of dead civilians. None of that was good
for morale. And if Aung San Suu Kyi was mentioned at all, the words
“evil tool of foreign interests” had better appear next to the name.
Words like “democracy,” “education,” and “corruption” triggered
close scrutiny. So a story about eleven missing and possibly dead
tourists was not likely to see headlines in the regime-controlled
newspapers, television programs, or radio broadcasts.
Don’t be mistaken. This did not mean the Information Ministry
and their Office of Strategic Studies in the Defense Ministry had no
inkling who the relatives of the missing were. The generals, the di­
rectors, and their subordinates had already reviewed tapes of GNN’s
stories of the missing. The ministry was in charge of finding such
stories—anything that reported on the country, whether in a good or
a bad light. They tuned to the Voice of America and BBC Radio,
which had escaped their control and which many bad-intentioned
people listened to surreptitiously. They also had a satellite dish that
pulled international reception from abroad. And their Press Scrutiny
Board gleaned every television program from unfriendly and power­
ful countries for any mention of Myanmar. Often it was the nephew
or niece of some highly placed official who had the cushy job of
watching The Simpsons, sitcoms like Sex and the City, and the real­
ity program Darwin’s Fittest, which many of them enjoyed as well.
The more rigorous review of news broadcasts went to those with
critical minds. Names of the guilty were thus collected and placed on
appropriate lists for banned entry, expulsion, and if appropriate, fu­
ture “enlightenment.”
The busiest news year had been when the Dead General’s daugh­
ter won the Nobel Peace Prize. What a lot of negative stories that
had caused. A constant bombardment! A disaster! Those Swedes
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