Propaganda and Fake News Editors: Myanmar’s Manufactured Transition

On April 10, Myanmar’s most heavily sanctioned general donned a longyi and declared himself president, marking the culmination of a carefully planned political transition. Min Aung Hlaing’s inauguration also represented the endpoint of a propaganda campaign that had been in development since January 2025. Understanding this propaganda machine – who built it, how it operates, and who amplifies it internationally – is important not just for Myanmar analysts, but also for every government in the region considering whether to normalize relations with the new government.

The Machine

The junta’s information operation has several distinct layers, each addressing a different audience. At the formal end sit the Global New Light of Myanmar, the civilian state newspaper and Myawady Daily (the Myanmar military’s own organ, run by its Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare). No serious observer takes either at face value.

The more consequential layer is the Myanmar Narrative Think Tank (MNTT), established under the Ministry of Information in January 2025 and operating through its public website. The founding members including a media operator with roots in the Than Shwe era (Ko Ko, chair, Yangon Media Group); an economist with international academic credentials (Dr. Zaw Oo, also a Central Bank director and executive director of the respected Centre for Economic and Social Development); a Russia-trained former military officer who runs a defense research institute (Dr. Naing Swe Oo); and a former Health Ministry technocrat (Dr. Khin Maung Lwin). It also includes several individuals who took part in the Myanmar peace process in the past, bringing credibility in terms of ethnic reconciliation and former closeness to the National League for Democracy government.

Each member was recruited to cover a specific narrative domain, such as economic credibility, security framing, ethnic reconciliation, and technocratic legitimacy. They also provide the civilian face that generals in uniform cannot credibly supply themselves.

The MNTT’s operating method was visible in its inaugural event, the “Myanmar Beyond 2025: Challenges and Opportunities in the Multipolar World” forum, which was held in Naypyidaw on March 21, 2025. Min Aung Hlaing opened the forum, presenting commemorative medals to foreign participants. The roster of speakers was carefully assembled for international optics; it included Professor Alexander Dugin (Russia), Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University (China), Brigadier Vinod Anand of India’s Vivekananda International Foundation, former Nepalese Prime Minister Madhav Nepal, and Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow. As with the MNTT’s founding members, each speaker lent credibility from a different regional direction. The Ministry of Information stated that the forum’s purpose was to “counter baseless accusations” and “promote the country’s image.”

How News Gets Made

Below the MNTT sits CNI Myanmar, a Yangon-based news agency founded in 2021, the same year as the coup, that claims to operate on principles of “Independence, Justice and Neutrality.” It has no named editors, no disclosed ownership, and no track record of challenging junta red lines. It continues to operate openly in Yangon while more than 20 independent outlets have had their licenses revoked and more than 200 journalists have been arrested since the coup.

CNI’s method is worth examining precisely because it is not as crude as the Global New Light of Myanmar or the Myawady Daily. It publishes significant political headlines that are crafted to seem legitimate, albeit without named sources or much evidentiary basis. It publishes MNTT statements verbatim, adopting, for example, the same institutional framing the junta’s ICJ delegation employed in January 2026, a characterization of the Rohingya crisis that Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry formally protested as “offensive and historically false.” It also attempts to frame the new rubber-stamp Union Parliament as a normal democratic institution. Obviously, its coverage omits any mention of airstrikes on civilians, conditions for political prisoners, battlefield losses, and the continued detention of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The result is a news product that, to a reader without the necessary context, might resemble legitimate local journalism. In a media environment where independent reporters have been arrested, killed, or forced into exile, CNI is filling the void by producing content that resembles journalism but functions as propaganda.

Beijing and Moscow at the Amplifier

The MNTT’s international reach was extended in August 2025 when Ko Ko personally signed a memorandum of understanding with Xinhua’s Yangon Bureau Chief. Myanmar’s junta thereby formally joined China’s Global South Joint Communication Partnership Program, launched at the BRICS Media Forum in Brazil in July 2025, connecting MNTT output to a network of 260 institutions across 110 countries. The program is explicitly framed around countering what Beijing calls Western “cognitive warfare,” as articulated in a report released at the September 2025 Kunming forum co-hosted by Xinhua and the CCP’s Yunnan Provincial Committee.

Russia plays a complementary role, providing the Myanmar military with arms transfers, veto cover in the U.N. Security Council, and state media coverage defending Myanmar’s transition. On signing a five-year military cooperation pact with Myanmar’s military junta in February 2026, Russia’s Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu stated directly that “Western pressure on Russia and Myanmar will not cease. You can fully count on Moscow’s comprehensive assistance, including in the international arena.” That assurance is aimed as much at Myawady Daily’s military readership as at any foreign audience.

Together, the architecture functions as follows: the MNTT generates legitimizing narratives and CNI distributes them domestically with a veneer of editorial independence. Xinhua and Russian state media distribute them internationally.

The Regional Stakes

According to a report in The Diplomat in April 2026, March was the deadliest month for civilians since the coup, with 518 people killed by the junta in a single month. Ordinary people across Myanmar are far more concerned about airstrikes, forced conscription, and acute food insecurity than they are about political transitions. As such, the propaganda machine’s intended audience is regional. This includes ASEAN governments that require some narrative justification for normalizing their relations with Myanmar’s new-look military government.

Since Min Aung Hlaing’s inauguration, he has hosted visits by the foreign ministers of China, Thailand, and Malaysia.  Both Cambodia and Laos have also signaled their readiness to engage in bilateral talks. Each visit has been preceded by a campaign of media content generated by MNTT that emphasizes the economic stability and democratic progress taking place in Myanmar. Last month, Alt News collaborated with the social network intelligence platform Graphika to investigate a related operation. They documented a coordinated disinformation network that placed fabricated analysis pieces across five pay-to-publish websites in eight days. Each piece cited unnamed analysts and was designed to be amplified by genuine users to create the false impression of independent corroboration. The infrastructure partially overlapped with that of known Chinese state-linked influence networks. This is the CNI method deployed across borders.

The junta’s strategy of fracturing ASEAN’s collective non-recognition by normalizing relations bilaterally, one foreign minister visit at a time, appears to be working. The Five-Point Consensus is effectively dead – and the junta’s information operations have helped to kill it.

The Information War the Resistance Can Win

At the same time, the democratic opposition has advantages over the military. The National Unity Government (NUG), the recently established Steering Committee for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF), and the network of ethnic armed organizations and People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) collectively control large areas of Myanmar’s territory and borders. In many areas, they enjoy legitimacy earned through five years of resistance to the military, which has killed more than 95,000 of its own people. This legitimacy is the resistance’s most powerful communication asset, and cannot be substituted by any PR contract or Xinhua MoU.

The resistance also has the truth on its side, and when truth is effectively distributed, it is an important advantage. Collectively, independent outlets including the Irrawaddy, Mizzima, DVB, and Myanmar Now reach an estimated 20 million people globally. Their reporting is trusted precisely because it has been produced under conditions of extreme personal risk. ACLED’s casualty data, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners’ detention figures, and the documentation of atrocities by local and international human rights groups provide a factual record that provides a damning contrast to the platitudes of the MNTT and the empty headlines published by CNI.

The resistance’s counter-narrative is also becoming more strategically coherent. When NUG Acting President Duwa Lashi La gave an honest assessment of the revolution’s setbacks on the PDF’s fifth anniversary, describing progress as ‘two steps forward, one step back,’ international media covered it extensively because the candor contrasted so starkly with the junta’s staged inauguration. This kind of credible, unscripted communication fosters the sort of long-term trust that propaganda cannot achieve. The formation of the SCEF in March 2026, which unified major resistance forces under a single political framework covering roughly a third of Myanmar’s landmass, also provides a counter-narrative, demonstrating that an alternative political reality exists, regardless of what myanmarnarrative.org publishes.

This does not mean that the information asymmetry is not a challenge. The junta recently signed a multimillion-dollar contract with a Washington-based public relations firm to lobby the United States government. Independent Myanmar media outlets are facing an existential funding crisis, as described by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last month. This crisis is due to USAID cuts, the expected end of Swedish media funding this year, and pullbacks by European donors, which are estimated to have removed significant portions of key outlets’ budgets. Burma News International has reportedly had to cancel radio programming that warned communities in conflict zones of incoming airstrikes. As the Reuters Institute stated, “If this ecosystem collapses, it could take years to rebuild.”

Supporting independent Myanmar journalism is a strategic imperative. Every dollar that reaches DVB, Mizzima or BNI is a dollar that undermines Ko Ko’s network, exposes CNI’s propaganda, and maintains ASEAN governments’ visibility of the junta’s conduct. The resistance has the stronger narrative. What it needs is the infrastructure to tell it.