By Andrew R.C. Marshall

Hundreds of foreign journalists are preparing to leave Myanmar after covering the by-elections that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide. Suu Kyi’s victory was historic, and so was the media interest: we represent the largest, legal deployment of foreign media to ever descend upon this long-isolated country.

I say “legal,” because scores of undercover journalists reported on the monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007, which was brutally crushed by the military. That bloody event now seems impossibly distant.