virtually free

Recently, I was chatting with a Burmese journalist in exile who works with an online Burmese news site and monitors the country’s blogosphere. A study he did just last week revealed that there are not more than 200 Burmese bloggers. Of these, only about 10 admitted to blogging from Burma. Of all Burmese blogs, less than 10 percent have political content.

According to him, the junta does not censor the blogs of those from outside Burma. Still, all bloggers -- political and otherwise -- hide their identities and take great care to go under the radar, so to speak. Censorship of the Internet in Burma is strictly and successfully accomplished, so much so that Reporters sans frontieres has included Burma in its list of 13 “enemies of the Internet” and has declared its Internet policies to be “even more repressive” than those of China and Vietnam.

Perhaps Internet restrictions have resulted in the small number of Burmese bloggers. But blogging does not necessarily indicate a free press. Take China as an example. Despite its estimated 17 million bloggers (and more than 10,000 newspapers and magazines, and 600 radio and TV stations), control of the media is still strong. Web and blog sites are either blocked or forced to shut down.

Imprisonment is another form of censure. In Burma and China, as in other countries with limited freedom of the press, any journalist working in any medium can be thrown in prison. But bloggers can be seen as a bigger threat because they work in a medium with the fastest publishing time and the widest reach. RSF maintains a list those journalists and other individuals who have been imprisoned for their Internet activities, including blogging -- 59 at last count, 50 of whom are Chinese. Some of them have been in jail since 1999.

In places where the traditional media are not free, blogging is journalism. But until bloggers can successfully evade a clampdown, they are only virtually free.