Mizzima News

Rangoon (Mizzima) – Starting from beginning of June, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Board will digitize its works of censorship on journals, according to the official of this department. 

Currently the editors and publishers of print media have to submit the draft copy of their publications in hard copies to censor board assessors. Now this will be changed to digital format by presenting soft copy stored in either CD or memory stick. 

This new system will be first introduced to weekly journals and later be expanded to other print media of monthly magazines and books, one of the assessors working on news journals from this department said. 

In this new system, the weekly journals must bring the soft copy of their draft publications in either CD or memory stick to Censor Board. Then the Censor Board will view these draft copies and layouts on their computers connected by LAN network and edit them. 

In the first stage, the edited draft copies and layouts will be sent back to the journals concerned by printed copies. Later these draft copies will be sent back to the media concerned by email and vice versa, this assessor said. 

A staff from this department said that the computers have been connected by network connection and the trial run was undergoing. 

But the media circle in Burma sees this new system as impractical as the internet speed in Burma is too slow to download an upload these files. 

But an official from this department said that the current system of submitting two third of the total pages be submitted one week before the publication date the rest be submitted 2-3 days before the publication date will remain unchanged. 

This notorious censor board popularly known in Burma as Press Kempatai named after the Japanese military intelligence service during the Japanese occupation in WW II, not only edited and deleted the pictures, illustrations and texts of the publications submitted to them for censorship, but also they asked 'no objection' recommendations from the Ministries and Departments concerned for the news and articles written on them. Moreover they inserted some texts and paragraphs written by themselves in these publications. 

An editor who usually deals with the censor board viewed this new system of editing and censoring on computers connected by network by the censor board staff will create more manipulations in censorship by rewriting the news and articles as they wished.