A lucid ruling by the Constitutional Court on Pita Limjaroenrat's iTV media share case has brought down the temperature of Thai politics.
Yet the lawsuit raises questions about the relevance of Section 98 (3) of the 2017 Constitution which was written to prevent politicians from using the media to gain an unfair political advantage.
The iTV share saga threatened to scuttle the meteoritic rise of Mr Pita, the former leader of the Move Forward Party. The court agreed unanimously to accept a petition forwarded by the Election Commission (EC) in July last year when parliament was about to vote on a PM. He was charged with violating Section 98 (3) for holding 42,000 shares in iTV, or 0.00348% of the total shares in the market in a once-popular TV news station that went off the air 15 years ago.
The court yesterday ruled that iTV is not a media company because it ceased performing as a business in March 2007.
Despite the company being registered with the Ministry of Commerce as a media company and it being involved in a lawsuit to claim 2.8 billion baht compensation from the government for cancelling its concession over a decade ago, the judges found iTV has never shown any intention to apply for a broadcast licence, nor any attempt to return to the media business.
The big question is what is the definition of mass media in today's times? Is it just commercial TV stations or newspapers registered with the ministry and approved under Thai law? That definition might be legally correct but it is far from the reality of the current media landscape in Thailand.
Traditional news corporations, whether newspapers or broadcast TV stations, do not have the influence they once enjoyed a few decades ago. Election winners such as Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Ferdinand "Bong Bong" Marcos Jr, or even the Move Forward Party don't have to spend a dime buying a single share in the media.
They can just avail themselves of the free service of Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) to communicate with voters and hold away over public opinion. Is Section 98 (3) prepared to cope with such media-savvy campaigners?
So far, over 65 politicians have been charged under this law, and a few have had their candidacy disqualified or been banned from public office even when they owned trivial or even minuscule amounts of shares.
One glaring case concerns Surachoke Tivakorn, a local politician from the Thai Pakdee Party who contested a local tambon election in Kachanaburi province. In 2022 the Kanchanaburi Provincial Court banned him from any political activity for 20 years. It also gave him a suspended 21-month jail term and ordered him to pay a 20,000-baht fine because he owned one single MCOT share worth just 5 baht.
Section 98 (3) is a good law, but it cannot reach its goal without being updated. One of the problems with Section 98 (3) is how its legal interpretation depends so much on the discretion of the judge, as to whether the politician involved used their shares for political gain.
After this verdict, critics and policymakers should debate how the media law can be improved to deal with new political realities, not just the individual assets of a politician.
Agencies such as the Election Commission need to develop a better system to filter candidates' assets before the polls, instead of disqualifying them after an election. As it is, this rather outdated stipulation is a problem in itself.