BANGKOK – The Thai Journalists Association warned today of an impending apocalypse in the local news media if the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Holders of Political Positions rules to seize all of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s assets.
“If Thaksin no longer has any money, he will no longer be able to fund the Red Shirts. Without over-simplified, color-coded polarized politics to generate easy, sensationalist headlines, the journalism industry could suffer its worst crisis since the fall of the Thai Communist Party,” said Thai Rath editor Limpattamapanee Chavarong.
Additionally, the loss of Thaksin’s money would severely curtail the ability for Thai journalists to randomly accuse him of having paid off every organization in the world that fails to parrot the conservative, royalist position of the mainstream Thai media.
“We could lose up to 75% of our content if it’s no longer feasible to just say that The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Amnesty International, The World Court, the CIA, and the British Parliament are all on Thaksin’s payroll,” said Thanong Khantong, editor of the Nation. “I might actually have to start looking up facts. It would ruin me.”
Rumors have surfaced that newspapers and even television news programmes have already designed radical contingency plans to deal with the possibility of a Thaksin-free Thai news apocalypse, including the firing of all senior editorial and reporting staff and replacing them with a younger generation of journalists trained in new technologies such as fact-checking and follow-up questioning.
“It would be a disaster for Thailand,” said an unnamed board member of the TJA. “It would effectively end Thai journalism as we know it.”
The Association has published an open letter to the Supreme Court, printed in its entirely today in several of the nation’s leading dailies, urging the court to leave Thaksin at least some of his money, as an act of economic protectionism for the kingdom’s vital pop-news industry.
“We remain as committed as ever to serving this great kingdom with the sensationalism of trivial details, speculation of absurd possibilities, and obfuscation of important issues,” the statement read in part.
“As the custodians of Thailand’s cultural traditions of myopia, amnesia, and deference to wealth and rank, we humbly seek your extra-legal interference in the free market of ideas and ask you to help us preserve the harmony of brutal, unreported status quo. In return, we promise to opiate the masses with lottery numbers, nationalist paranoia, and soft celebrity gossip,” it concluded.
Representatives of the industry plan to rally outside the court on Friday, adjacent to the Red Shirts.
For once, we’re on the same side as those filthy, ignorant, paid-off, terrorist republicans,” said Thanong. “I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
