0.50-Clashing press, clashing ego, by special contributor Mark, a former senior Bangkok Post reporter

Thai Rath likes sexy girls, crime stories, meant for the mass-but also the best political news in Thailand

They say respect is earned.

It took me nearly half an house to write those first few sentences on my first days at the Bangkok Post, as my editor would just laugh at me while saying only about 100,000 will read it. Six month after that I was banging the likes of Chuan over the head with my writings as if I was slapping a mosquito. It was a process of ego building that I went through at the Post and it felt like being on top of the world. There were people like Tony, head of the Bangkok Bank calling up and when companies went public, free shares that over time amounted to millions of baht just flew in.

Yet one day in front of the mirror I didn’t see me but saw all of my childhood friends scared shit-less of me and I walked and sounded like a mad man always judging and criticizing others-including my wife and kids. In a shock at what I became, a process of de-egolizing took place deliberately and finally one day, after a long fight, I returned to normal, and resigned from the Bangkok Post.

Washed-up everyone there called me. Eventually I became the editor of a small newspaper and my staff say they never met and editor who is so “unassuming and gentle” as me before. It was a complement of a lifetime for me, better than a Pulitzer.

Today, Thai e news, the democratic oriented blog, ran a series on the fighting between Manager, Matichon and INN. And as the words pore out from all sides, there is really nothing as far as intelligent goes, because all it is is ego talking. The fight is really about PAD people treating Matichin reporters like crap at the government house, roughing girls about and all. So Matichon started to take PAD for what it really is, which is a gang of political hooligans. That obviously got Manager going and Manager, the propaganda arm of PAD, really hit back at Matichon hard.

Well Matichon being Matichon and if you spent time in the newspaper business as long as I have and ran into their reporters and even the bosses, they are nothing but literally “Mad Dogs” in nature. I mean you can’t have a normal conversations with these people because they just “Bark and Bark and Bark.”

Well being Matichon, being anti-PAD does not mean being friends to Thaksin, as many expected it to become. While it did got a bit more neutral, it still hounded Thksin. So when INN start running stories about countries offering Thaksin refuge, Matichon started to investigate and the verdict today is that nobody knows if INN were just making those stories up from scratch or not. However it sounded like INN, a long time anti-Thaksin force, was kissing Thaksin butts with those stories and so Matichon hit at INN like a bull dog.

To cut the story short, the fighting and bad feeling still goes on today, and it is making those involved look real ridiculous-like INN having to come out and say the source it use is from the internet that doesn’t last as the story gets removed, and Matichon saying that Bloomberg, the US wire service, is a German news outfit.

Meanwhile, Sondhi of the Manager got zapped with pictures hugging his friends teenage kid very closely and someone just had to take a picture of the girl up-front to show that the girl has really really really large breast and in those hugging between the two, it shouldn’t have been that close. Yet even with breast rubbing, Sondhi said he laughs at those who talks about this and then went into about half an hour who his friend is.

PAD has a long history of using Manager to really go after other press that doesn’t follow its line of reporting. One of the first that got hit was Thai Rath, which has always been neutral. So manager figures Thai Rath was getting too close and supportive of Thaksin and so Manager went after the founding father of Thai Rath. It was real nasty, the likes that I used to do myself at the Bangkok Post.

But what did Thai Rath do? Nothing! Thai Rath just maintained its course and didn’t hit back at Manager or showed any sign of anger or that the ego was getting control of their senses. In fact, when positive news for PAD came up, Thai Rath would just reported it the way it is, straight. And when bad news came up, it was also straight again.

No need to say, this article start by saying that respect is earned, and surely, looking out into the landscape of Thai press, there is really only Thai Rath that continues to show maturity and character, and this also reflects in the stories and reporting. In concluding, as Thailand deteriorates into the land where emotions are more important that intellect, as a reader, please keep asking yourselves to be careful what you believe in. because most of the time, it is just journalist ego talking and that is about all there is to it.