Non-stop news
For photos of today's morning violence click below.Sarot Meksophawannakul
Jetjaras Na Ranong
To see the Bangkok Post's news room this afternoon, click here.
Photo by
Jetjaras Na RanongThis has been a day of non-stop news. It seems pointless to simply cover a story from the morning paper and let it go at that. On historic days like this one, I like to do updates throughout the day. This way, English language learners can get a good idea about how to understand and explain the news they are seeing in the Thai media in English as well.
To do this, I usually depend on television. Waiting for reports on the Internet is too slow and the television news here is actually quite good and remarkably free -- probably the result of a weak government. Since I've been here for almost 30 years, the language is not a problem. In fact, for news reports I process Thai just about as well as I do my native English.
The one channel covering today's events non-stop was the new public channel, Thai TV which took over for ITV. Unlike its precessor, it tends to be quite straightforward, certainly not slanted towards the government. In fairness, the government was probably unhappy with all the channels today as they showed quite graphically what happens when teargas shells are fired into a crowd. It's not pretty as you will see from the photos taken by two Bangkok Post photographers, Sarot Meksophawannakul and Jetjaras Na Ranong.