BANGKOK: With Thaksin Shinawatra stepping down as Thailand’s leader, the country’s media is rediscovering traits that it had earned a reputation for in the region — criticising and exposing those in power.

Signs of renewed liberalism taking root were visible over past two months, when tens of thousands of largely middle-class citizens of Bangkok took to the city’s streets to rail against the Thaksin government and calling for his resignation.

But it was in the country’s state-controlled broadcast media that the first cracks began to appear, when television stations began, although marginally, to report anti-government voices that had been shut out for most of the five years that Thaksin had ruled.

“They began to report news critical of the government because of the political momentum on the streets and because there was a very high sense of political awareness among the people,” Supinya Klangnarong, a media rights activist, told IPS. “If they didn’t, they would have been seen as being out of touch with the people.”

Even some of the country’s major Thai-language newspapers, which are independently owned, reflected a shift from being soft on the Thaksin administration to echoing anti-government voices.

“The coverage was so different to what had been before, and it was clear that the mainstream press were enjoying a level of unprecedented freedom,” Kulachada Chaipipat, a Thai representative of the Southeast Asia Press Alliance, said in an interview. “It was bold and there was no sign that they were afraid of threats and harassment.”

This political space for free and open debate and reportage that had been pried open by the anti-government demonstrators remains one of the highpoints of the uncertain political road that Thailand has taken.—Dawn/IPS News Service