10 nov 2003

The problem of filling the news columns in the papers and the news bulletins on TV is becoming steadily more difficult, as the boundaries defining what is “safe” news shrink. A few days ago, Sulak Sivaraksa made a speech. By the standards of “normal” times, this was a newsworthy event. Sulak has been a public figure for four decades. The speech marked a significant milestone in his life (70 years). He had telegraphed in advance he might break his self-imposed moratorium on political comment. He did not disappoint. He compared the prime minister’s manipulation of the media to Hitler.

The issue is not whether one like’s Sulak or agrees with his judgement, but what constitutes news in a country which likes to think it’s a democracy. Even a few months ago, such an outrageous statement by a well-known figure would have rated a mention. To its great credit, The Nation ran the story. In three other dailies delivered to the Chang Noi household, there was not a whisper. In four others searched on the net, no sign. This was a newsworthy event that never happened, a speech instantly erased from public memory.

Sulak’s speech is just a small example. Whole vistas of Thailand’s public space have disappeared. Protests no longer happen. Public intellectuals seem to have been exterminated. NGOs appear only when being described yet again as agents of foreign powers trying to stop Thailand’s development. The political opposition is allowed just enough space to demonstrate its debility and disarray.

Now so much news is not fit to print, the media are struggling with what to do with the empty space. We are getting more sports coverage, more foreign bulletins, more entertainment trivia, more crime, and a lot more almost-naked women. The TV bulletins are padded with touching stories of poverty and hardship.

But all this in-fill is not enough for a simple reason: there is a real demand for news. This is a legacy of the past twenty years when public debate, commentary, criticism and scandalisation were forces driving the society and politics forward. All the starlets, footballers, human interest stories, and displays of female flesh cannot quite substitute for a story which has newness and historical significance.

And so, we now are treated to circuses.

Some of these are crafted creations, and here the stunning example was APEC. The event around which the circus was created was of course a very minor meeting of very limited historical significance. Quite brilliantly, the government recognised that the event’s almost complete lack of significance meant that it was a great opportunity to stage a promotion of Thai tourism. But there was also a second purpose behind the billion-plus invested in the circus – reconfirming that this government is the right and only one to run Thailand in the globalisation era. For that message to come over, the domestic audience had to be persuaded that APECorama was a serious meeting and an “unqualified success”. Government-owned television stations are still running follow-up programmes in which presenters mouth these two mantras in the same way gameshow hosts reel off the brandnames and slogans of their sponsors.

But such obviously staged circuses are less fascinating than those which appear spontaneously, created by the public demand for “news” and the media’s desperate need to meet that demand. In the last couple of months we have had two fine examples of these spontaneous circuses played out in the “Big Top” of the public media. The first was Chuwit Kamolvisit’s gladiatorial battle with the police. The second is the Thammawattana whodunnit.

In other times, the Chuwit story might have rated a few column inches under a headline like “Flaky entrepreneur accuses police in self-defence”. But when Chuwit was pushed into the circus tent, in front of him was a huge news vacuum which sucked him in and blew him up into a month of continuous coverage. Books. Talk shows. Endless interviews. A cabaret appearance. And innumerable sideshows with changes of costume, props, and location.

The Thammawattana circus follows the same pattern. Perhaps it might have rated a few column inches under a headline like “Family demands review of unexplained death”. But it has ballooned into the Chuwit pattern with books, talk-show appearances, and endless interviews. So far there has been no cabaret, but the wonderful Khunying Pornthip serves as a kind of on-going vaudeville performance. And the sideshows made Chuwit’s efforts seem very feeble in retrospect. We got to see a 4-year old corpse defrosting, and fruit being murdered.

The showtime of these circuses seems to be around a month, and so the Thammawattana one may be close to its final curtain. What is next on the playbill is difficult to predict. The media’s desperate need for “news” means that any event can quickly be sucked into the great vacuum of public space. But the Chuwit and Thammawattana examples suggest these circuses have some key common features.

First, these circuses are about money, and maybe also about how to make it. If the Chuwit saga makes it to a textbook, it could be titled, “How to make money from girls and policemen”. The Thammawattana story is a classic detective story in which the main motive is a massive inheritance.

Second, these circuses are about authority and its corruption. The plot-behind-the-plot in the Chuwit saga was about which policemen (or other figures of authority) were making how much and how high did it go. The plot-behind-the-plot in the Thammawattana case is exactly the same. Exactly.

The first of these features just shows the age-old fascination with excessive wealth. But the second is more interesting. The usual means for public criticism of those in authority have been suppressed. But people still distrust those in authority. Deeply. They are angry at the ways power is manipulated for personal gain. Deeply. And they hope for something better. Deeply.

These circuses are not just for fun.