29 sep 2003

Recently the prime minister expressed his concerns about growing trends of violence, and the problems of youth. He specifically drew a connection between consumerism, violence, and prostitution. Schoolgirls are prepared to sell their bodies in order to buy brand-name goods. Young men resort to violent crime in order to have money in their pockets.

These concerns are echoed in the master-plan of the Ministry of Culture. It begins from the idea that “consumerism fuelled by competition of the most materialistic kind” is at the root of a range of social problems including drugs, violence, abuse of women, and lax sexual practices. The Ministry hopes to counteract this trend by promoting a more moral, learning, and caring society. The prime minister has asked Purachai to refocus on social order. “Thainess” will be used as a weapon to combat social problems, especially among youth. A budget has been allocated to make TV programmes suitable for youth. And so on.

This sounds heartening. But it’s time for a reality check.

Consumerism is not just about buying an absurdly expensive Prada bag to show off at school. The fastest growing item of consumer spending over the last few years has been the mobile phone. The biggest category of advertising spending – the motor which drives consumerism – is the mobile phone industry. By comparison, Prada and all the other luxury trinket vendors are very small players. Every day, the television, radio, newspaper, bus side, BTS train, and billboard are screaming at the Thai citizen to spend, spend, spend on a mobile.

The biggest of the mobile companies is of course AIS, mainly owned by the prime minister’s family. Unlike some of its rivals, it has focused its advertising very single-mindedly on the youth market by using currently popular stars. Once it had the hyper-kinetic Nicole. Now it has the retro flower-child, Palmy. The ad campaign theme of freedom is geared to youthful aspirations. The mobile is a necessity, a status symbol, a friend, and a means of escape. Prada’s appeal is nowhere near as compelling.

Last week, Chang Noi hopscotched across the TV channels at drama time. The first channel was in the middle of a gang war. Some five or six people were shot in the back by a small arsenal of automatic weapons. Another was crushed by a speeding car, after which the scene cut to a bloody knife fight. Across on the next channel, two men were in the final stages of a fist fight. One was banging the other’s head hard and repeatedly on the ground in slow motion. On the third channel, a man punched a beautiful woman three times in the mouth, then wrestled her to the floor as prelude to rape. The ads intervened, and Palmy floated flower-child-like across the screen, enjoying her freedom and her AIS mobile. The traverse of the three channels and their assorted mayhem had taken maybe two minutes.

All three of these channels are controlled by organs of the state. One (in fact the most violent in this sampling) is managed by the family of the minister in charge of social order.

This two-minute sampling was not abnormal, though perhaps exceptionally concentrated. The extent, frequency, degree and realism of violence on TV have been growing steadily over about five years. Several things seem to contribute. The directors apply more skill and technology to the portrayal of violence. The gang shot in the excerpt mentioned above went down in a riot of blood-spurting bullet wounds. The channels are more and more ready to portray sex and violence in the competition for viewers and for ad revenues. Old self-imposed constraints about what was “not acceptable” or “too un-Thai” have been steadily relaxed. Perhaps this is because the industry has become politically more powerful, and hence less deferential to outside authorities.

There is another, more subtle aspect. Television is being increasingly manipulated as propaganda for the government and for the uniformed services, especially the police. This seems to have started as a counter to the growing criticism of men in uniform (for unofficial violence, for bribe taking, etc.) by civil society, academics, and press. Many of the most violent TV dramas are fables about the police defending citizens against evil, especially in the last year against drug dealers. These dramas portray the police as young, attractive, glamorous, hip and find them working from offices worthy of the company selling Prada bags. The plots are as realistic as the settings.

This manipulation of television is not confined to the dramas. The content of news programmes has radically changed over the last two years. Political and economic news have been sharply reduced. In their place we have more human interest stories, more “entertainment news” (actually, advertising for the channel’s own dramas), and, especially, more crime stories. The latter have become the most prominent part of the news. As in the dramas, the theme of these stories is the police as defenders of the citizenry against evil. And again, these news stories use evidence of violence (dead bodies, blood, smashed cars, guns) to dramatise the theme.

What are we to make of this? Ministers of the government tell us they are concerned about consumerism, violence, and their social impact. But if we look at these same ministers’ family business interests, we find they are promoting consumerism and exploiting the dramatisation of violence in the pursuit of profit and certain propaganda goals. The budgets put behind these latter efforts are large enough to smother all the well-meaning efforts of the Ministry of Culture.

All this is one of many results of erasing the gap between business and politics. Ministers may be sincerely concerned about youth and social problems. But the logic of commercial competition means their family business concerns are unlikely to exercise self-restraint.