It was a bright morning in June 2003 when a guard at Myingyan Prison in upper Myanmar brought a fresh copy of the Myanmar Times to my cell, along with several state-run newspapers.
For political prisoners like me, newspapers were a rare and precious link to the outside world. We lingered over every page, searching for any hint of what was happening beyond the prison walls. The papers—made available only after pressure from the International Committee of the Red Cross—were tightly controlled and heavily censored, yet they brought a quiet excitement that was hard to describe. Even distorted news mattered. At the time, the only newspapers allowed in prison were the military-run dailies and the Myanmar Times.
Before I was jailed, I devoured international publications and followed regional politics closely. Inside prison, newspapers became the highlight of my day despite their relentless coverage of military policies, official speeches, and carefully staged achievements. Until then, we had been denied all reading material. We passed our days peeling discarded cheroot butts, often wrapped in scraps of junta-run newspapers—fragments of text glimpsed only long enough to be destroyed. When intact papers finally arrived, they represented more than information. They were proof that words still mattered.
That belief was tested on that June morning more than two decades ago.
On the front page of the Myanmar Times that day was the headline, “Motorcyclists from NLD shock town.” The article described how local residents were allegedly outraged by the “unruly behaviour” of Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters, claiming that angry townspeople confronted them and that the clashes resulted in injuries and deaths.
I read it inside my prison cell and understood immediately what it meant: my prison life would continue.
In Myanmar, the fate of political prisoners has always been closely tied to politics beyond prison walls. Meetings between senior generals and opposition leaders, or visits by Western envoys, could sometimes signal releases. Periods of dialogue occasionally opened prison gates. But when politics hardened—as they had in June 2003—more people were swept into detention, and those already behind bars lost any realistic hope of freedom.
After reading that front-page story, I decided that someday—if I were released—I would look more closely at how the Myanmar Times was run. That decision was made in 2003, inside a prison cell, shaped by the realisation that journalism, when aligned with power, could shape not only public memory but private fate.
Life, however, has a way of folding back on itself. I was released from prison in 2005 following an internal purge within the military that sent hundreds of military intelligence officials to jail. Some of those officials, I would later learn, had played key roles in the creation and operation of the Myanmar Times.
In 2006, I found myself briefly inside the Myanmar Times newsroom as an intern, trying to understand how Myanmar’s media functioned under military rule—including the very newspaper I had once read behind bars.
My time there lasted only a few days. What struck me most were the newsroom meetings: subdued, cautious, and conspicuously silent about the most urgent issues of the day. There was no discussion of arrests of labour activists, no debate about human rights abuses, and no serious attention to the wars unfolding in ethnic minority areas. Most editorial energy went instead into trade, oil and gas projects, and the daily movements of senior generals.
I understood that the Myanmar Times, like other media operating under military rule, could not openly report on many of these issues. What surprised me was something else: there was no discussion of them at all inside the newsroom. Silence was not only imposed from outside; it had been internalised.
The structure of the newsroom reinforced this absence. Reporting was rigidly organised around assigned beats. A reporter covering the bean trade wrote only about beans. Someone assigned to the central bank reported only on official statements. Going beyond one’s designated beat—raising questions about arrests, conflict, or abuses—was treated as an aberration. Certain subjects were never raised, let alone debated.
It felt less like journalism confronting reality than journalism carefully avoiding it. I left soon after, feeling that I had seen enough.
Nearly two decades later, in 2024, unresolved questions resurfaced. When former military intelligence figures re-emerged publicly in China as part of the junta’s public-relations efforts, I began examining their business interests. That inquiry led me back to the Myanmar Times—and further, to Frontier Myanmar.
By then, many of the key figures associated with these publications were based in Australia, where I now live. After repeated efforts, Ross Dunkley, an Australian publisher and editor who was a co-owner of the Myanmar Times, agreed to meet me in Perth.
Before the interview, we went together to one of the largest churches in downtown Perth and prayed quietly for peace in Myanmar—a country that has endured decades of dictatorship and years of intensifying civil war. It was an unexpected, grounding moment.
Only then did we sit down for the interview. Dunkley defended the paper’s role in training young Myanmar journalists but acknowledged that the Myanmar Times was effectively set up as an influence operation for military intelligence. He also described how commercial interests—particularly in oil, gas, and mining—shaped investments in the newspaper as a way to cultivate relationships with powerful generals.
Jayne Dullard, the first Australian editor hired by Dunkley for the Myanmar Times, had saved thousands of draft stories containing evidence of military intelligence involvement in the paper. She generously shared these documents with me and spent hours giving interviews.
This investigation seeks to correct the record about the history and development of independent media in Myanmar—a history distorted by decades of myth-making by military intelligence, its successors and their beneficiaries.
This story follows a line that runs from a prison cell in Myingyan, through a silent newsroom in Yangon, to documents and testimony gathered in Australia. It is an attempt to understand how media, power, and business converged—and how that convergence shaped what the public was allowed to know.
