Public lose the airwaves
The junta is poised to “reset” the regulatory body that makes all the key decisions about radio, TV and mobile phones. Secret meetings of selectors have narrowed a field of 86 applicants down to 14 shortlist candidates. From that final list, the National Legislative Assembly will soon vote on which seven are best qualified to sit on the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC). There will be winners but more importantly, there will be so many losers.
The biggest losers in this race to place favoured candidates on the NBTC will be the general public. In many vital ways, the purpose and duties have been switched 180 degrees in the brief history of broadcasting regulation. The authors of the 1997 “people’s constitution” designed this body to be run exclusively for the benefit of the public. Its purpose was to strip away government-military control of all airwaves in order to return that control to its actual owners — all Thai citizens.
It has taken just 20 years to reverse that correct goal. When the military’s NLA votes on who to place on the new NBTC, the legislators will be at least theoretically making its selections from seven “sectors” of society. These are radio broadcasting, TV broadcasting, telecommunications, engineering, law, economics and consumer protection. For sure, the 14 remaining candidates all are qualified with the narrow, junta-approved specifications. It is just that none of the seven categories properly represents the most important sector of all, the one that the 1997 constitution set out so clearly.
That charter, trashed by the army’s 2006 coup to unseat the Thaksin Shinawatra administration, stated clearly that radio, TV and phone frequencies must exist solely “for public interest”. In naming the members of the independent regulatory body, now known as the NBTC, “regard shall be given to utmost public benefit at national and local levels in education, culture, State security, and other public interests including fair and free competition”. That seemed clear 20 years ago, but today has been forgotten or simply ignored.
By setting out the seven sectors to be represented on the NBTC, the junta has simply ignored the public. There are those who argue that the “consumer protection” sector represents the citizenry in general. In fact, the official and public-sector consumer boards have failed at virtually every step of development of broadcasting and telecoms development. While including some consumer-aware representative to the NBTC is not in itself a terrible idea, it is unrealistic to believe that such a person will properly represent the public’s legitimate, legal demand to have full access to all forms of broadcasting, all the time.
A good example is community radio. The men behind the 2014 coup ordered all such stations to be closed, on the arguable grounds that their political broadcasts were dividing society. Troops descended on every station and seized all broadcasting equipment to ensure the ban could not be broken. It was a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The majority of community stations, even in the highly charged 2013-14 period, served — as the name states — small communities. Today, it is the military that holds all power to “allow” community broadcasts, even though it is a constitutional right.
The unshakeable fact is that the 1997 constitution writers were correct. But instead of public ownership and control, the radio, TV and phone frequencies are under the thumb of rich and powerful businessmen. They answer to the military, rather than the public. After elections, because of the junta’s reset of the NBTC, they will answer directly to government. The public, official owners of the airwaves, has no say and not even the courtesy of a token representative on the new, juntaapproved NBTC.
Today, it is the military that holds all power to ‘allow’ community broadcasts.