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A must-read by @the_ayeminthant. To anticipate any unnecessary comments: it's not distracting from the real story. @clarissaward's CNN trip to #Myanmar encapsulates the coloniality of Western engagement with SE Asia, a key part of it all. 1/6 https://newnaratif.com/journalism/every-journalists-worst-nightmare-cnns-myanmar-misadventure/share/wtbyqoret/28a44b766a22348069810714aa8b9e15/
With coloniality, I mean the specific matrix of global power that has emerged from the legacy of European colonialism. Today's authoritarianism & conflict in Myanmar has in many ways been enabled by British colonial rule that purposefully created deep divisions in society... 2/6
.. but here specifically, I mean the ways in which European colonialism continues to shape the relations between the West and the Global South today, including the production of knowledge about #WhatsHappeninglnMyanmar on an international level. 3/6
. @the_ayeminthant shows how the parachuting of a white American journalist who has never had anything to do with Myanmar, expropriated knowledge from a desperate society for nothing more than her own vanity and the profit of a commercial news channel. 4/6
For producing this story, Ward did not only not care about her interlocutors' safety, but actively imperilled one woman in front of security forces with a question "that had absolutely no news value—whose only purpose was to make a spectacle of the woman’s fear." 5/6
That Ward rids herself from any responsibility by simply blaming the security forces for the many arrests that her reporting has caused (& gets away with this!) comes to show how she profits from the colonial matrix of power that contributes to subjugating the people of Burma 6/6
