The Bangkok Bubble – Farang Media

Since the American War on Vietnam, Bangkok has been a key hub for international journalists and academics in Southeast Asia. It offers modern infrastructure, easy travel, and a high quality of life, allowing them to chopper into the periphery and return home for drinks. These advantages foster a professional environment removed from the region it purports to cover. Western expatriates operate engulfed within a certain elite social and informational milieu, often resulting in confused, racially essentialist coverage aligning with the interests of the moneyed Bangkok elite.

This was clear during the past six months since the outbreak of the border war with Cambodia last year. This triggered a judicial coup against left-populist PM Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the installation of Ultra-Right leader Anutin Charnvirakul, the dissolution of parliament, and elections scheduled for February 8th. Foreign correspondents have seemed bemused, writing contradictory pieces. Analysis like BBC’s Jonathan Head’s, citing how much “we just don’t know,” boils mass class-struggle in a country of over 70 million down to petty elite factional rivalries (as is the case with the conflict with Cambodia) and often parrots the Thai elite line. In this instance, the English language coverage was generally anti-Shinawatra, anti-Cambodian and broadly pro-Thai state.

If ignorance is one component, another is racial essentialism. The BBC even published a guide to following racial generalisations in the region. Such analysis is chauvinistic, imperialist, and fundamentally racist. Chief BBC Correspondent Jonathan Head, based in Bangkok for 20 years, exemplifies this; of course he “just doesn’t know” what’s going on, he can’t even speak the language. Meanwhile, any Thai person somewhat versed in socio-political history knows how much we indeed do know, such as the history of the Thai military on the Cambodian border in the past 40 years and the patronage networks that developed as a result.

Unlike cleaner Singapore or more tightly regulated Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok has an aesthetic grit; a few slums, open sex work, and street vendors on crowded pavements. Said vendors often speak basic English, while the elites the foreigners rely on are fluent. This allows the foreign correspondent or researcher the thrill of an edgy, orientalised posting without learning the language or developing a non-Bangkok-centric critique. This network becomes a closed informational loop, dependent on interpreters and fixers from the same consensus, unable to seek dissenting viewpoints outside this circuit.

Interestingly, this file for this picture when downloaded was captioned “abby-with-guest-at-fcct-dinner-2010-by-nick-nostitz_orig”. Just noting that “Abby” seems to be a very friendly and familiar nickname for the then-Prime Minister in charge of a massacre of Red Shirts.

The G.I Era

Since the 1950s, Thailand has been a safe Western ally, developed into an anti-communist bulwark for attacks on revolutionary movements in China & Indochina. During America’s war on Vietnam, academics were also shipped to Bangkok by the US to develop experimental counterinsurgency projects. As detailed in Anthropology Goes to War, one academic said, “Working in Thailand is like working in Vietnam, except no one is shooting at us”.

G.I Era Bangkok was a hub from which the region was pimped out to grotesque paternalist Western interests and desires: Political capital, bars, drugs and women. It was a place of both soft and hard power- as researcher Cynthia Enloe chronicled, detailing the use of Asian women by Western men as objects of political and economic capital. Today this relationship still functionally exists, as western journalists do overpriced lines of cocaine in Ari bars with their local girlfriends patiently waiting out front.

Institutions like The Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok (which Jonathan Head chaired) still play a vital soft power role for the Bangkok elite and Western powers. Within these walls, Western and elite Thai journalists rub shoulders, speak English, develop their consensus and amplify their echo chamber.

Censorship
Without learning the language and history, Thailand is a difficult country to cover. State censorship has been constant since the 1950s; books have been burnt and writers of critical histories disappeared. English sources on anti-communist state mass-killings during the 1960s-70s are predominantly written by the American academics who took part in the acts. The most basic sources like Wikipedia and Reddit are compromised by Thai state agencies like the Cyberscouts, who use them promote pro-monarchy content and censor critiques. While professionals wouldn’t admit it, these basic sources are often the jumping-off point when beginning research into any subject, the first results in a Google Search, thus it bleeds into both not only into journalism but academia. Critique of the monarchy is banned and punishable by lengthy jail sentences; critical international publications find staff work visas revoked. Ironically, the UK tabloids have been one of most staunch reporters on the Thai monarchy, as they rely on freelancers rather than permanent Southeast Asia correspondents.

This dynamic directly consequences reporting. The country’s deep economic disparities, felt most acutely outside the capital, are covered sporadically, if at all. Chronic oppression and struggle are reduced to simplified narratives of protest and crackdown, missing any underlying social and economic conflicts or political agency- particularly as it pertains to the peasant classes. This is how English-language narratives of class conflict are flattened into interpersonal elite disputes.

Even for those who can speak Thai, the censorship still applies. Critical records are hard to come by in public. One must be embedded in communities outside Bangkok to hear histories first or second hand. This is why someone like Jit Phumisak, the radical historian killed in the 1960s, is so celebrated as one of the rare voices able to break the elite consensus. Despite his popularity domestically, little of his work is translated or accessible. Furthermore, the few Thai writers who have left, outside the reach of censors, have inevitably passed through Western academia and NGO’s, or are dependent on their funding, further compromising their critique.

A Flat Narrative
This insulated model benefits Thailand’s elite power holders; the political, monarchic, military, and business elite in Bangkok. They provide reliable access in English, framing events to emphasise simplicity, stability and legitimacy. By interacting only with this primary group, the media adopts its framing. A political crisis is presented as a temporary disturbance, whilst deeply rooted structural class antagonisms are downplayed as routine challenges of development. English language reportage of the country and the wider region thus has a persistent pro-Bangkok bias, whether the writers know it or not.

The outcome is a soft power advantage for the status quo. The elite secures favourable international portrayal, while journalism’s supposed critical function is inverted. The press and academy, focused on maintaining access and visas, fail to interrogate the forces engaging in the nation. The number of English language writers who critically cover the Kingdom is countable on one hand; the names Tyrell Haberkorn and Claudio Sopranzetti come to mind.

So much of Thai history is open-secrets known by the majority of the population, which is still the rural poor, but remains inaccessible to those at the Foreign Correspondents Club. To learn them, you must speak Thai, leave Bangkok, understand the local dialect, be in the villages, learn the meta-language of state repression, learn to read the room and gain its confidence.

Even then, censorship remains, and a small clutch of Western writers like Andrew MacGregor Marshall and Paul M. Handley have faced severe backlash for their reporting. Largely, this is a risk most would rather not run, when they could instead wake up in their Ari condo, attend a Correspondents Club talk, eat street food with their local girlfriend, go to a Thonglor bar, and order pizza delivery for when they get home to their 30,000b condo- feeling very worldly in the process. Bangkok’s allure is undeniable, so too is its effectiveness in shaping the English-language consensus on the kingdom: a flat, muddled image of the country, rife with generalisation, where class struggle and the aspirations of the poor do not exist.