Staging

Thanyarat Doksone

I have a story about staging to tell. This happened in Thailand right before I flew to the U.S. to study here. As many of you might not know, Thailand, a Southeast Asian country, takes the issue of monarchy very seriously. Thai people pay their supreme respect to them and place them highly, even higher than ourselves.

On July 10, 2007, a team of Thai college students won the first prize in the World Robocup 2007 in Atlanta, GA. A photograph was taken and sent to most newspapers in Thailand. The pictures showing the students with their winning robot, the trophy and one of them holding a picture of the King of Thailand in a frame.

That photo was put up on almost every daily in the country on the following day. However, a tabloid with the self-proclaimed largest circulation, Thai Rath, made a tiny change to it. The paper retouched the photo to get rid of the King's photo frame and made the guy holding nothing in his hand. Later, media critics in the country came out to slam the paper, as its intention was very obvious. It is a tradition in every Thai newspaper that whenever you have photos of the monarch or other royal family members on the front page. It must be placed on the top of the page layout. Intentionally, Thai Rath edited that photo, so that it could be put in the lower part of the paper to pave the way for other hard-sell headlines, which apparently were crime news.

That was a rare incidence that raised concern about media ethics in my country. I am sure staging might have been done much more frequently but nobody has ever noticed. I think this is one of the reasons the public do not trust journalists as much as they did in the past.

Throughout discussion in class, we always heard that one of the challenges that journalism faces these days is the rising skepticism toward journalists and we usually wonder why or even blame them for distrusting us. I think it is time to start questioning ourselves about what we do that makes them think that way.