In Other News — Кассета

Episode #635: “The thing that works the best is always to humanize the numbers,” says Australian journalist Libby Hogan. That principle has emerged from more than a decade of trying to report Myanmar without reducing the country either to a democratic success story or to whichever crisis temporarily commands international attention. Hogan first encountered Myanmar as a backpacker before the NLD’s 2015 electoral victory, then returned through an internship with the Democratic Voice of Burma that became years of reporting during the country’s fragile political opening. The limits of that opening became impossible to ignore during the violence against the Rohingya. Restricted access to Rakhine State complicated reporting while Facebook filled with hate speech and misinformation. From Yangon, Hogan watched international images of mass displacement alongside a far more muted response around her, forcing difficult questions about prejudice, fear, restrictions and the responsibilities of local journalism. International coverage created another problem: editors initially wanted almost nothing except Rohingya stories, then gradually lost interest even as the crisis continued. Now working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Hogan has to persuade an audience thousands of kilometers away to keep caring about Myanmar. That can mean telling the story of menstrual pads stopped at a military checkpoint because they might be used as bandages, or documenting scam compounds along the Thai-Myanmar border where trafficking victims are forced to defraud strangers online. Inside one raided compound, Shunda Park, investigators found thousands of SIM cards, photographs used for face-swapping, scripts for cultivating romance-scam victims, rows of computers and isolation cells for workers who failed to meet quotas. Yet even these large compounds are changing. Operations are appearing deeper inside Myanmar and becoming smaller, more mobile and harder to observe. Hogan is still pursuing the problem that first drew her to the country: finding ways to make hidden realities visible when both access and international attention keep narrowing.