The sensationalistic coverage of the death of a three-year-old girl in Mukdahan has come under fire by academics and activists for repeating gratuitous violence and failing to shed light on structural injustice.
Chanettee Tinnam, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Communication Arts, said the coverage of crime had followed a familiar plot: a conflict between good and bad built up to a sensational climax instead of exposing gaping holes that had existed in the justice system for 40 years.
"Don't stand on the tip of the iceberg when you cover crime," Ms Chanettee told a forum yesterday. "Dig deep until you find out how gaping holes in the justice system victimise marginal people, for example, this three-year-old girl. She was the subject of media coverage because she was young and born to parents who are low-income farmers in the country."
Yesterday's event was held by the Children, Youth and Family Foundation, the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation and the Youth Network Reduce Risk Factors.
Ms Chanettee said the avalanche of crime news reflected a volatile political and social environment, adding that authoritarianism had enfeebled the role of the media in maintaining checks and balances.
"I conducted research on newspaper coverage of crime since Dr [Dan Beach Bradley [in the nineteenth century]," she went on. "When our society has been weak, during the period of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat for example, we saw a lot of scandalous stories, such as rape and domestic violence."
Ms Chanettee also urged the media to question whether covering crimes in a dramatic fashion offered anything useful to their audience and whether the use of immersive technologies [the digital simulation of the physical world] really represented the truth.
"It can make the audience feel that they are 'truer' than witness accounts," she said. "In the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard, the postmodern theorist, warned that replicas can be truer than reality itself. This is the problem of virtual reality because the media assume that what they replicate and present is the truth for viewers."
Thicha Nanakorn, director of Baan Kanchanapisek, said media attention has focused on individuals responsible for crimes instead of flaws in the system.
"For example, the public heaped blame on five teenagers who raped a girl but nobody knew that they had dropped out of school," said Ms Thicha. "After being excluded from the education system, where could they go? They must take responsibility for what they did but reporters should identify underlying problems."
Meanwhile, Supinya Klangnarong, the former commissioner of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC), said the agency would take swift action against those who breached victims' rights in the course of sensationalising crime.
Ms Supinya, who resigned from the NBTC more than three years ago, said the agency has become familiar with media companies to the extent that it gives rise to a patronage system which forestalls checks and balances.