Veera revisited | 24.03.05

The removal of Bangkok Post editor Veera Prateepchaikul last year was immediately seized upon by the media both Thai and foreign as yet another case of the Thaksin government’s interfering with the press. That is a gross and pervasive misinterpretation that I will now, more than a year later, attempt to redress.

Before we begin, you should familiarize yourself with the case — or more precisely the prevailing misperception of it — by reading this passage from Philip J. Cunningham’s Nieman Reports article titled “Government Pressure and Thailand’s Press” (PDF):

Then in late February, Veera Pratheepchaikul, the editor of the Bangkok Post, was unceremoniously sacked. The Post, like the rest of the Thai media, had been suffering from the oppressive atmosphere of Thaksin’s nanny state: “Why didn’t you give more positive coverage to government accomplishments?” “Stop writing about bird flu!” “What will foreigners think?” “Don’t you care about the fate of the nation?” Additionally the Post was hit with specific in-house complaints about certain editorials, critical articles, and even letters to the editor. Sacked editor Veera related to me that the outside meddling that led to his dismissal was gradual but inexorable, making his last months on the job physically exhausting as the tempo of complaints increased.

Let me point out the problems with this narrative point by point, in crescendo:

First, Veera was officially appointed “deputy Editor-in-Chief of Post Publishing”. While that may be akin to a senior bureaucrat being transferred to a post with no real work or power at the dreaded Office of the Prime Minister, he was not fired, as Mr. Cunningham’s choices of the words “sacked” and “dismissal” would have led us to believe. Indeed, the Editor-in-Chief he would be seconding was none other than Pichai Chuensuksawadi, his predecessor at the Bangkok Post editor’s desk. To this day, Veera still works for Post Publishing and still writes regularly for the Bangkok Post (most recently this past Monday, when he lamented the erosion of internal opposition to the government’s planned EGAT privatization).

Second, the four remarks “quoted” by Mr. Cunningham give new meanings to the term “out of context”. Not only are they all disconnected one-sentencers with no backgrounds, they are detached even to Mr. Cunningham’s own writing, which doesn’t even bother to specify whose quotes they are. If indeed they belong to Mr. Thaksin (as they most likely do), then are they supposed to demonstrate the country’s “oppressive atmosphere”? Having spent two years in China, during which many North Koreans risked all to breach the Chinese police’s barricades and seek asylum in foreign embassies, I do know a thing or two about authoritarianism and suppression (to say that I know about “oppression” would be too grandstand). Yet I’ve never heard the Chinese leaders (let alone North Korean leaders) engage in public quarrels with their media. You simply don’t argue with your mouthpiece. Thaksin’s outbursts of frustration indicate his lack of control of the media, and they only give his media opponents more ammunitions to use against him, as Mr. Cunningham did in this article. As for the “nanny state”, that’s a different issue altogether. The reader can judge for himself whether Mr. Cunningham deserves brownie points for bringing it up.

Third, regarding “in-house” complaints, I don’t find it the least bit out of ordinary for a government figure to complain to journalists if he thinks their stories are inaccurate. Journalists aren’t infallible and, after hearing the complaint, they themselves decide how to proceed. If those calls were in any way threatening, you can trust the receivers to have told us all about them. So far, however, we seem to be stuck with the “loss of advertisements form ‘connected companies’” whining, whose flagrancy shouldn’t need pointing out (but probably does anyway, since no one seems to notice it).

Letters to the editor, of course, should be beyond that. Government officials have no business in this forum for readers. Except, perhaps, in the role of the readers themselves. For example, even if I somehow worked for the government, I would still like to reserve the right to excoriate the Bangkok Post for publishing this letter:

PM Thaksin, I feel sorry for you. You should have been happy winning with a majority, but instead you won by a landslide. Now, instead of only dealing with the Democrats, you have to worry about us temple boys as well

We don’t have anything to lose. We care deeply about Thailand and we will not let you dictate everything.

I always refer to you as a semi-dictator. I do not call you a dictator yet, but you are getting close. You talk like a dictator, you act like a dictator. I don’t know what to call you but a dictator.

I don’t know if Khun Thirayuth was a temple boy, but I certainly was. How did you find out anyway?

PM Thaksin, you talk like a temple boy too. Do you know the meaning of mutchima patipata? Go find it out and practise it.

SOONTONG SWANWIT
San Francisco

The problem with this “letter”, I hope we can all agree, isn’t that it would upset Thaksin, but rather anyone who cares about the English language. Indeed, it’s so egregious it’s hilarious, especially in light of Mr. Cunningham’s description of the Bangkok Post as a “venerable newspaper” in his Asian Wall Street Journal article (Feb 26, 2004, sharing much of the same material with the Nieman Reports one).

(FYI: Thaksin’s “temple boy” remark was a retort to a Thirayuth Boonmi “research” in which he compared Thailand to a temple and Thaksin, the abbot. And although this letter is recent, Khun Soontong’s letters — all similar to this one in both style and substance — have regularly been published, including during the time when Veera was at the helm.)

Now as the final blow to the widely-held belief about Veera’s removal, recounted here by Mr. Cunningham, I’d like to quote this account from a Bangkok Post insider:

Let me tidy this up for you a little. True, the board tried a few months ago to get rid of Veera. But your portrayal of him as a fearless proponent of truth and freedom of speech is way off the mark.

Veera cut copy at the behest of the chairman of the board. Normally that would have kept the chairman happy, but last week Veera became overzealous and spiked a column by a woman who regards the chairman as a personal friend. She took offence.

To the extent he was critical of the government, it was only because some copy managed to slip through without him seeing it. I can’t emphasise that point enough.

He was on the phone on a nightly basis to production staff, telling them what headline to change, what copy to cut. In some cases he would take it upon himself to make these changes, without telling anyone. Guess who wrote today’s front page story in which he is portrayed as a fearless defender of free speech?

The Post’s coverage of the King’s speech, in which the headline accused Thaksin of arrogance, upset Thaksin. But as I say, some things managed to slip through without Veera changing them.

The chairman apparently has a son-in-law who works at the Post who has highest-level access to what goes through the system. He phones Veera, who in turn phones the night staff to tell them what changes to make. The guy was a stooge, and his successor looks no better.

If Kowit had any spine, would refuse to take the job until any ”doubt” about the Post’s independence was cleared up.

Note, of course, that this Post staffer is no fan of Thaksin. Indeed, he resents Veera because he’s no fan of Thaksin. (update The last two sentences are inaccurate, as the “Post staffer” himself has kindly pointed out in the comment section below.) If he’s right and Veera was not transferred because he was too anti-government, but rather because he was too pro-government (at least in his censorship), then the allegation of “government interference” comes tumbling down, does it not?

Not according to Mr. Cunningham, who apparently heard about the spiking but still tried to cling to his narrative:

Veera has been quick to point out he was no hero in this free press saga. He willingly walked the tightrope, trying to maintain credibility while juggling mounting political and commercial pressures. In his last few months on the job, he angered fellow staffers for uncharacteristically spiking a number of articles and even a column by Post veteran Kanjana Spindler, Thailand’s answer to Maureen Dowd, who poked fun, in a delightfully caustic manner, at the hubris and delusion of a government- sponsored fashion parade that coursed down one of the dirtiest streets in Bangkok. Around the time Kanjana’s column was due to run, a full-page color ad sponsored in part by the Central Group ran in the Post expressing “Honorable thanks to H.E. [His Excellency] Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the Government” for the “great success” of “The 1st Fashion Phenomenon.”

The crux of the matter at the Post was that the right hand was taking serious money from the pro-government fashionistas, while the left hand insisted on the freedom to criticize the same. And it is to the credit of replacement editor, Kowit Sanandang, that Kanjana’s controversial column belatedly got the airing it so thoroughly deserved.

Mr. Cunningham mentioned this in passing, as a side issue in a report that otherwise does portray Veera as a hero (guess who his main source is). Still, having eaten the cake, he wanted to have it, too, so Kanjana Spindler and Kowit Sanandang won praises as well. (Some would say the Dowd comparison isn’t much of a praise, but even if it is, it doesn’t apply to Kanjana, whose style is far from Dowd’s trademark playfulness — or frivolity, depending on your point of view.)

But does this make any sense? Doesn’t spiking an article that “thoroughly deserved” to be published (and written by a friend of the company’s chairman to boot) make one a bad editor? So bad that the columnist and her chairman friend may want to sweep him out of the way?

Notice, too, the “uncharacteristically” bit. The fellow staffer quoted above seems to disagree.

Toward the end of the piece, Mr. Cunningham included later developments that make me wonder whether he ever felt the need to rewrite the whole article from the beginning but was just too lazy or stubborn to do so:

In the spring, Central Department Store had promotional giveaways of the Bangkok Post and Post Today, even on days when articles critical of the government were run. This is a happy reminder that the success of a newspaper requires a healthy distance from the powers that be. And a certain amount of passive-aggressive compensation for the cave-in to higher powers is evident in recent issues of the Post, which has used the word “regime” to describe the Thaksin administration and has redoubled its efforts to uncover dirt on the badly bungled southern unrest. And fans of Veera’s subtly subversive news analysis no doubt welcome the continuation of his weekly column.

So it seems this whole episode has no real consequence beyond that the editor who yanked Kanjana’s article was replaced by one who printed it. Government interference? Does Khun Kanjana have friends in the government, too, despite all her negative op-eds? Given the choice, would you rather have the government or the chairman on your side in this case?

In conclusion, let me recap the whole story for you in chronological order:

1. Of the two major English language news paper in Thailand, The Nation is viciously anti-government while the Bangkok Post is falsely seen by some as government-friendly (it’s actually just less vicious).
2. Kanjana Spindler is good friends with Suthikiati Chirathivat, chairman of Post Publishing PLC, occasionally lunching with him. (According to a Bangkok Post source. All other information here is public.)
3. One fine week in February 2004, Kanjana wrote an article critical of the Thaksin government, as she always had done before.
4. Veera spiked the article.
5. Veera was removed by the end of that week.
6. The Nation and most of the Thai and international media hailed Veera as a martyr.
7. The spiked article was published the following Wednesday.
8. The Nation remains anti-government.
9. The Bangkok Post remains anti-government, if less so than The Nation.
10. Veera still writes for the Bangkok Post.

Now answer for yourself why Veera lost his editorship.

P.S. In his Nieman Reports article, Mr. Cunningham also called Thirayuth Boonmi a “respected academic” and said he was “roundly criticized for daring to criticize”. With that strange formulation, is he not criticizing Prime Minister Thaksin for daring to criticize Thirayuth? Isn’t his entire article about criticizing Thaksin for daring to criticize the media?

P.P.S. Rereading Mr. Cunningham’s AWSJ article, I found this snippet:

[T]he rote, obligatory praise voiced by ruling party supporters sounds eerily similar to the worst of communist propaganda, the irony being that the press is now beginning to loosen up in China while Thailand slips backward.

If any more proof is needed that the international media types have followed the lead of their local colleagues and completely lost their minds about Thaksin’s Thailand, this should settle it.

Update More on Philip Cunningham.

23:51 ▪ media, politics

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1

Post staffer 31.08.05

From you, Tom:

”Note, of course, that this Post staffer is no fan of Thaksin. Indeed, he resents Veera because he’s no fan of Thaksin.”

Speaking as your source (the ”Post staffer”), I have to disagree. I happen to like Thaksin, and always have, thanks very much. My feelings towards him have nothing to do with it.

I would, however, like to have a decent editor working over me.

I don’t ”resent” people, by the way. If I did I would have quit working for that newspaper long ago.