- By Tammy, Thai Intel’s humanity journalist
You know someone has some serious problems, when they are nothing but idiots with a huge ego. Consider the following report!
- Indonesia Coming On Strong:
Jakarta Post just written, in an editorial, quote: “There are many achievements in recent history that makes today’s Indonesia taller than many of its neighbors. One of them is a robust free press. Confident and fearless, the “fourth estate” is doing the country proud.”
- Thai Media Dips Deep into Dirt:
Thai media, much nothing but idiotic and egotistic, is known to tell the government it must do this and that-like all the time, not just in editorials but editorial guise as news as well. But as the Thai media is telling the Thai government to do this and that-Thai Intel often wonders, who is telling the Thai media, it must do this or do that-like improving itself to meet the challenges of an ASEAN community.
Well, heading into that ASEAN community, is a Thailand that is rated by Freedom House as a “Not Free” country, and Indonesia as a “Free Country.” So yes, off course, the Thais will not accept that ranking, and even with the ranking, the talk here in Thailand is all about “The Right Amount of Freedom.” But when a country is rated “Not Free” one knows that the country’s press is also not free. And again, yes, there is a whole lot about Thailand that the Thai media can not write about-like Thai Royalism or the monopolistic nature of the Thai banking cartel.
- One Bad Apple Rots The Whole Bunch:
But the problem is that when media can not get serious and write about serious issues, but is controlled, that media tends to turn to the reporting of the “Ridiculous” to survive economically-and the result is just mud-slinging and dirt.
And that is what have occurred to Thailand-with major news group such as the Nation Group and Thai Rath, nothing much more than the working place for massive numbers of idiots-who produce ridiculous-based reports.
For example, in Thailand, the biggest news in recent memory, propagated and reported on by nearly every Thai media, as a big story, is about a dead “Boy name Fish” prediction that Thailand’s largest dam will burst last New Year. Yes, many Thais and most of its media took the “Fish Boy” prediction very seriously. Off course, the dam did not burst.
- A Lost Media Community:
The sad twist of fate? Thai media experts are using the “Dead Boy” report to say, “Freedom of the press has limits.” Say what? Already too much freedom in a “Not Free” country? And this is from Thai media experts, off course.
So do not be surprise, when you look at the Thai newspapers, and it is filled with reports of Thais rubbing banana tree for lottery numbers and a horde of others report like that.
And that type of bullshit reporting spills over. Even political reports, turn into a banana tree rubbing ceremony, with the media making up reports based on who knows what rumors-and packaging it as hard-hitting news.
- Result? A Country of Back-Ward People:
In sum here, when you have a general media mood of nothing but bullshit, and a culture that worship that type of news, meaning “Rubbish” what it means, for Thailand, is that the Thais in general are a very backward type of human beings-like they may have iPhones, but the conversation on them is like about “Which tree to rub next or who is a good fortune-teller currently.”
- The following is from the Jakarta Post:
Analysis: Media ownership reflects conflict of concepts
Debnath Guharoy, Roy Morgan | Tue, 01/10/2012 10:17 PM
There are many achievements in recent history that makes today’s Indonesia taller than many of its neighbors. One of them is a robust free press. Confident and fearless, the “fourth estate” is doing the country proud.
So far, so good.
But if they believe they are the voice of the people on the one hand and influencers of public opinion on the other, one thing they need to get right. Facts. They need to get their facts right, every day and every time. The ownership of mainstream media continues to shrink the world over, with a handful of big businesses controlling many former independents. Despite the rise of online journals, the conventional TV stations and newspapers continue to get more eyeballs, massage more minds. It has got to a point now that we may well debate whether media owners serve politicians or vice versa. They are supposed to be independent.
Throw a handful of Big Business into the mix and we have a lethal concoction that can render the voter, the average citizen, mindless. By his own admission, Rupert Murdoch has been a backdoor-visitor to the homes of British Prime Ministers for decades.
It can safely be assumed they weren’t talking with him about horticulture over tea. By my reckoning, Silvio Berlusconi survived as Italy’s democratically elected leader because his powerful TV stations distorted the truth for many years. There is no research to back that opinion, so take that with as much salt as you wish. With similar concentrations of ownership in the advertising industry, or “communications consultants” as they prefer to be called nowadays, we have nothing less than a ticking time-bomb staring at the face of democracies everywhere.
Can we expect anything less if it costs a billion dollars to get a president elected in the world’s most celebrated democracy? That’s just another example of capitalism’s cancerous grip on fundamental freedom. Moving a step forward, we enter the realm of “manufactured truth”. Anybody who is familiar with the term “push polling” will know how easy it is to create desired results, without cheating blatantly.
Researchers, like doctors, follow a code of ethics. But some doctors, like Michael Jackson’s, go to jail. I don’t know of a researcher ever being locked up. I know a few who should. I know journalists who don’t understand polling data that’s staring at them. Yet, they are the folks who are opining, not just reporting on the “facts” before them. Very few of these writers, nor their editors, have the professional training nor the basic instinct to ask the simple question: who, where, how many? Anybody who understands the basic tenets of statistical reliability would accept 1,100 respondents as a reasonable sample size representing the views of some 150 million potential voters stretched across the archipelago.
The concept is proven every week in the United States. But in large countries like Indonesia, India and China with sometimes unbelievable differences in income, education, ethnicity and culture, the need for “over-sampling” is obvious. The complexities are compounded by the simple urban-rural divide as witnessed during recent elections in Thailand, or simple parochialism as demonstrated repeatedly by India’s fractured electorate.
That’s why the risk of getting it wrong with standard ratios of population to respondents looms high in large, complex societies like Indonesia. Indonesia has 33 provinces and 560 “voting areas”. If you divide 1,100 respondents by 33, what do you get? Precious little. 33.33 respondents per province, to be precise. If all of those 1,100 interviews are conducted in the capital cities of the 33 provinces, as they usually are for reasons of cost, we will invariably end up with two different kinds of results every time. First, a solid and reliable number for one big issue on a national dimension: for example, “which party’s candidate will you vote for if an election was held today?”
But if you drill that same database down to a particular province and say Party No. 5, we are most likely to get a very wobbly number. As issues and influences change in different places at different times at different speeds across pockets in a large landscape, reading an Indonesia or an India accurately, and consistently, becomes a major challenge. That is why pollsters in both countries often get it wrong.
That is if they did their jobs honestly in the first place. To illustrate the complexities, take another look at the KADIN-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence index, over time. As the chart confirms time and again, people in Indonesia’s big cities, small towns and villages don’t always feel the same way about the same thing. Sometimes they do, more often than not they don’t. That’s not surprising. Life in the kampung isn’t exactly the same as it is in the Ibu Kota. The trouble is that research isn’t exciting. Except for researchers. So very few people bother to find out how it really works. And so, many get away with what is tantamount to murder.
Yesterday’s press, including this newspaper, reported how distorted their own reporting can be. Hatta Rajasa, one of the most unlikely winners in the next presidential race as at now, got the most mentions in Indonesian media last year. That’s according to desk research conducted by the Center for Democratic Studies. The inference drawn by most writers (and readers)? He is the most popular candidate, simply because he is a ranking minister and a darling of the media. Prabowo Subianto, currently the most likely winner, got the least mentions.
Go figure!
The opinions expressed are my own. The conclusions are based on the country’s largest syndicated surveys conducted by Roy Morgan Research. More than 2,000 respondents are interviewed each month, every month, and projected to reflect 87 percent of the population over the age of 14. The writer can be contacted at debnath.guharoy@roymorgan.com.
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