Sunday, December 19, 2004
True.
So I was grabbing a bite to eat in a place on Thanon Khao San and the radio was on. The announcer said: "Here is the news, from the Thai government public relations agency". Which I thought was kind of funny, in a 1980s-satire-of-South-African-reporting-restrictions sort of way, except that as far as I can work out what followed was a genuine news broadcast, apparently written by the Thai government for broadcasting on radio. It was interesting to see how blatant they were. Kind of like if the BBC were to open their broadcasts with "The Six O'Clock News, from Michael Moore and the op-ed page of the Independent".
(Okay, it was probably a translation error, like the one that led the airport bookstore to shelf the prison diaries of Jeffrey Archer under Non-Fiction. I'm sure the radio meant to say that the news was provided by the Ministry of Truth, or something totally innocuous like that).
(Okay, it was probably a translation error, like the one that led the airport bookstore to shelf the prison diaries of Jeffrey Archer under Non-Fiction. I'm sure the radio meant to say that the news was provided by the Ministry of Truth, or something totally innocuous like that).
