Swallowing it, hook, line and sinker

More important issues to gripe at? Like what? Bloodier revolutions, even more cynical takeovers? 

I think everybody would agree that what’s extraordinary about the popular uprisings that have taken place in the last two years, including in Bangkok, has been the role the video clip has played in our understanding of the issues that are at stake. Indeed, if we don’t challenge the live coverage of such events, then we fully deserve the governments we end up with afterwards – because spin has been just as important as the trajectory of bullets in the outcome of each and every one of these uprising. If the lobbyists are allowed to dominate the coverage, then we are going to get the governments of those who pay the best lobbyists, and not necessarily of those who actually died in the uprisings. And that’s really tragic. 

The complaint against the Ratchaprasong coverage is that most of the the western reporters on the ground did not grasp the terrible ironies, including the indisputable fact that there were military as well as paramilitary personel with weapons on both sides of the divide, and that the real WMD was, in the end, not the gun or grenade, but the camera. Almost all the western clips focussed on the banners in English over the Ratchaprasong stage, for example, while neither the cameramen nor editors seem to have understood one word of the Thai that was whipping up the people. The western media allowed itself to be manipulated by the literally higher images that were hung up for them in English, and in the end broadcast not the truth of the event but the doctored message of those behind the scenes who were paying the bills. We swallowed the political con, in other words, hook, line and sinker.

What the foreign media failed to cover in the riots in Bangkok in 2010 was the deliberate, Machiavellian efforts to create mayhem – the bloodier the better (all those syringes, do you remember, and the buckets?) And that omission has played right into the hands of the lobbyists who are paid a fortune to influence the John L Sheppards of the world who read the fine papers he says we ought to read instead. Well, we read them, too, but with a grain of salt. Because we saw with our own eyes the events upon which those articles were based, and we saw the clips too, transposed, misplaced and doctored on our screens the same evening, and we were appalled.

What was essentially an attempt at a hostile takeover of Thailand by business interests has been billed in the West as a democratic event seeking justice and equality for the poor. And we’re seeing the consequences right now – just read it today in the papers!

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai