Media is a mouthpiece of the middle class : Atukkit

In a public talk deconstructing the media on Sunday at Thammasat University’s Tha Phra Chan campus, media experts and senior journalists discussed obstacles and limitations that have recently influenced the media.

In a discussion held by the Thai Civil Rights and Investigative Journalism (TCIJ) organisation, speakers challenged beliefs that messages presented by the mainstream media are either “true” or “reliable”.

Atukkit said the media is a tool of the middle class, which is dominant in the Central region of the country, who use outlets to mobilise the public.

“What topics the middle class is interested in will be in the news,” he said.

As a result, he said, middle class values and ideology pervade the mindset of the mainstream media.

“Thai middle class behaviour mainly is subject to consumerism, but their mindset mostly tends towards conservatism,” he said.

“That’s why ideas of conservatism characterised by goodness, nationalism and royalist loyalties appear in the Thai mainstream media.”

Mainstream media is also institutionalised, said Pirongrong Ramasoota, lecturer at the Faculty of Journalism of Chulalongkorn University.

News stories are “cooked” according to the attitude of each news organisation, she said.

She added that journalists rarely function as national watchdogs and mostly cover news according to advocacy interests rather than ideology.

Local media, she added, also consistently serves as state propaganda.

Supalak Ganjanakhundee, senior foreign editor of The Nation newspaper, said “filters” influence media outlets preventing them from independently functioning as a “medium”.

He addressed six filters including profit orientation, media sponsors, the selection of interview sources, the manipulation of information in which journalists present assumptions as fact, news organisations’ ideology and propaganda campaigns.

He added that in the digital world where social media plays an essential role and the audience can produce news, journalists who do not specialise – and instead jump to conclusions – will become obsolete.