Recognition comes as military junta and China dominate Burmese information space
WASHINGTON – Radio Free Asia (RFA) has won two National Edward R. Murrow awards for chronicling the struggles facing young people from post-coup Myanmar. The recognition for this coverage comes as RFA was forced to suspend much of its news-gathering operations due to the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s illegal cancellation of its grant and RFA’s uncertain future.
“It is hard to believe that right now, Myanmar’s media is dominated by its military junta and China,” said Bay Fang, RFA President and CEO. “Challenging those narratives through hard-hitting, fact-based reporting has been RFA’s mandated mission by the U.S. Congress.
“These awards serve as a stark reminder of RFA’s critical role in the Asia-Pacific region even as many of our language services, including RFA Burmese, have gone silent.”
The multimedia feature Myanmar’s Gen-Z fighting for a nation’s future, produced last November, includes videos, images and text profiling the challenges and resilience of the generation coming of age after the February 2021 military takeover. An RFA team based outside the country returned to Myanmar to speak to people on the front lines in one eastern region to learn about their stories – and their hopes for the revival of their blood-stained country. More than three years of fighting has displaced more than 3 million people inside the country, and refugees continue to spill across borders to the west, south and east. While the military maintains control of the country’s largest cities, anti-junta forces have made unprecedented territorial gains.
A 2023 survey of Myanmar found more than 5.1 million Myanmar adults accessed RFA content regularly either online or through shortwave broadcasts.
The awards will be presented by the Radio Television and Digital News Association in New York on the evening of October 13.
State of play at RFA: Until March, RFA was one of the only international outlets to have a sustained in-country presence since the 2021 military coup. RFA’s Burmese Service was forced to stop operations after the USAGM in March 2025 illegally cancelled the grant that funds Radio Free Asia. At present, 90 percent of RFA’s staff has been either put on unpaid leave or has resigned. RFA continues to fight the illegal termination of its grant funds. The matter is currently being litigated in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, with a hearing scheduled for late September.
