In 2012, Yangon was abuzz with meetings and conferences on media development—something unheard of during the military regime. These meetings followed public announcements by the quasi-civilian Thein Sein government installed in March 2011 of a reform agenda that would include improvements to the media laws. According to the former information minister Ye Htut, these planned reforms date back to 2007, under the former military dictator Than Shwe, when the junta studied options for legal reform (Mclaughlin 2014), while Kean (2018) places the start of the change in 2004 after a high-profile purge of military intelligence. When the National League for Democracy (NLD) formed the government in 2016, expectations were high that technical and procedural problems with the laws and their enforcement would be reviewed and addressed (Htet Naing Zaw 2016). Yet civil society has been disappointed by the lack of political will to bring the laws in line with international norms and standards. Instead, the NLD-led