Thai Culture Minister To Check TV Drama After Six-Year-Old Girl Hangs Herself

[junglist]

That’s why no Thai soaps are allowed in my house. They only teach sadness and helplessness. Our prayers go out to the family.

[kevin2008]

Very very sad.....my sister-in-law hung herself in the kitchen of her home in Minburi, BKK, last Saturday evening 3rd....in Europe myself, but wife travelling out today Monday. It is said that sucide grievers never "get over" and it never heals.

[TAWP]

The quality of Thai soaps and game shows have made me want to hang myself after watching them too.

Luckily my gf has Universal, Sci-fi channel, SET channel and more...

[ChoakMyDee]

:lol: :lol:

You missed the point. Where-o-where did I mention censorship? Your post seem to allude to the dreaded nanny state type of government which tells people what to do and that you left your home country to get from under the yoke of an oppressive system. Honestly, I did not see you mention censorship until just now when I re-read your post. My fault for not being diligent.

It sounded like you were saying everything is just fine and dandy - the country does not any improvement. That is what I was commenting on because it always seems to me that people against enhancements want to keep the country down. Maybe my view of that is wrong, but the place really does need to improve in many areas and people who say all is fine make me wonder.

Just a FYI - I hate censorship and the parents need to monitor what their kids are watching, not the state.

TheWalkingMan

Look, we are both posting on a thread about a 6 year old girl hanging herself allegedly after watching a TV show and the Culture Minister is considering censoring Thai soaps and putting them on at a later hour. I'm against the idea of censorship. I'm all for parents being responsible. I haven't missed the point at all. If you are talking about improvements then what would you improve? The quality of the rope she used? Now I see that you actually agree with me. So where is the argument? You are acting a bit trollish.

[KhaoNiaw]

Most of the Thai soaps are formally rated 13+, with an announcement to that effect shown before the show starts.

Probably nobody pays a blind bit of notice; they always know better, you see. . . . . .

But they put them on at all times of the day.

[Thai at Heart]

Look, we are both posting on a thread about a 6 year old girl hanging herself allegedly after watching a TV show and the Culture Minister is considering censoring Thai soaps and putting them on at a later hour. I'm against the idea of censorship. I'm all for parents being responsible. I haven't missed the point at all. If you are talking about improvements then what would you improve? The quality of the rope she used? Now I see that you actually agree with me. So where is the argument? You are acting a bit trollish.

The issue of moving them beyond a time that most kids could watch them i.e. 9pm isn't in and of itself a bad thing.

There is a world of difference between censoring fiction and reality. What is going on here is including issues into stories that children (and also adults)sometimes cannot rationalise. Children deserve to be protected from certain things until a point at which they can understand them,.

I believe we all want parents to be responsible, and on ThaiVisa, you probably have more than your fair share of responsible parents. The shame of what may be happening here is that the quality of TV in Thailand is probably at its absolutely lowest ebb. The endless barrage of soaps is patently too much, it occupies ALL of the prime time slots on ALL of the channels. Can't the domestic channels come up with ANYTHING more than this endless diatribe of idiocy?

Move the soaps to after 9pm, put an adult warning on the more racy ones, don't show men beating women, dont show attempted or successful rapes, TRY A FEW NEW STORY LINES instead of variations of Othello and Romeo and Juliet all the time, and come up with something that families might hope to watch together between 7 and 9. Of course we could ask for the ultimate censorship and brand the google box evil and just ban it. No one is asking for that. What has happened over the last few years is that the story lines of many of these soaps have become more and more adult in their subjects but they are still shown at the same time they always were.

This is not really an issue of censorship, this is simply about trying to prevent young minds from being exposed to things that they are not ready to rationalise.

I don't consider moving adult issues to adult times of the day to be censorship or part of an encroaching nanny state.

Edited July 5, 2010 by Thai at Heart

[ChoakMyDee]

The reason there are so many soaps is that is what they want to watch. The reason they are so popular is because most Thais prefer to watch soaps after dinner. It's none of our business to try to change the way Thai people live. If you don't like them then don't watch them and mind your own business. How dare you try to impose your ideas on them.

That girl was hanging for hours before she was discovered. There seems to be some serious negligence on the part of the parents or there are other facts we don't know. How convenient it si to blame her death on a TV show....absolutely ridiculous.

[onnut]

RIP to the young girl, very sad no matter who is to blame.

For the record, I think Thai Soaps should be blurred out from beginning to end. It's all noisy crap!

[JetsetBkk]

RIP little girl.

I wonder how many people saw this trash on UBC (Truevisions) recently:

Blood covers the screen, the heroines, the villains, the floor, and everything else in this film, sometimes to the point where it's all you can see. Fingers are made into sushi, an arm is battered and deep-fried, a woman discovers her son's head in her soup and then vomits as she is stabbed through the mouth from behind, her blood mixing with the extra-chunky puke to pour enticingly onto her son's disembodied head in the bowl in front of her

http://www.amazon.co...i/dp/B0016K76V4

- about 7 pm on channel 41 Film Asia. Nice family viewing.

The bit that caught my attention while channel hopping was the sight of a girl hanging by her wrists being tormented by a man who first cut off her fingers one by one, then sliced off one of her arms. Nothing censored. The tormenting went on so long I even had time to get my camera and take some shots - the least offensive is below. After slicing off her arm, spurting blood went everywhere. Nothing censored. He even put his head through the girls legs and licked her thigh. Nothing censored. He then lit a cigarette. Censored by pixelation.

[zthyadat]

Very sad yet predictable. I read an article in the Post sometime back about the adverse effect that thai tv has on the behaviour of the nation and this tragic event is one of them. The academic who wrote the article stressed how in the absence of the parents( usually working away and grand parents asleep) that the tv was the biggest educator/role model for young children. What we see in thai tv is mirrored in everyday life. Take your pick from violence, unable to communicate always shoutings, upper class characters referring to their maids has lower class, shootings and my favourite the digustingly white faces of the leads actors.

Then when the adverts come on we are bombarded with whitening creams and beauty products, at which point the tv gets turned over to watch more soaps. Have you ever been watching thai soaps and they keep flicking over the channels at adverts but dont return to the original programme when the adverts are finished. They may return 10 mins later and just pick up the storyline like they never left it. The reason they can do this is because every soap on every channel on every day is near enough the same storyline. Handsome (white skinned) hero, beautiful (white skinned) leading lady, evil (white skinned junky) mother, A katoey (white skinned), a midget ( skin colour optional), a gang of thugs with machetes (always brown skinned) and a Tom (usually white skinned) who none of the other cast realise that she is a tom.

The storylines include dying people in hospital who always make miraculous recoveries in time for next weeks show, vendettas, men attacking women etc. We should not discuss the acting skills of these characters because there are none. It reminds me of old time vauderville, where the actors had to over emphasise facial expressions so the people at the back of the auditorium could see. In short its mind numbing <deleted>.

Coming from a country who have a 'watershed' time of 9pm for certain programmes supplemented by parental guidance i now understand , after being here 7 years, how dangerous the goggle box is. In thailand the tv is the biggest cause for a disfunctioning society. There is no choice what to watch, the shows sponsors dictate the storylines which means they are all the same. Give a young child ubc and he will end up watching programmes like 'Animal Planet' and english speaking cartoons. Wheen a child on channels 3 5 7 9 11 and this will inevitably go in some way to determine his future behaviour.

The tv should be used to inform and educate the masses not dumb them down. My two young children are not allowed to watch any of the thai channels until such a time that they are able to decide for them selves what is right and wrong. It is obvious that the people cannot in general decipher what should be taken light heartedly and what tv should be believed. It is the governments responsibility to protect its citizens, so do the country a favour and turn this crap off.....

I agree in a small part in theory of some of your thoughts but TV is a reflection of society and not the other way around. The issues of light skin, lower class was all much worse here in Thailand BEFORE TV. Also, advertisers are not deciding what people watch but are TV programmers are programming for what people WANT to watch to make more money from advertisers. It is illogical to think they don't want the most popular program.

All the talk of the internet and TV being harmful is nothing new. The same was said about Radio and even books hundreds of years ago and not to mention things such as plays and other forms of art & entertainment. Many of these same books and plays that were condemned back in the day are considered some of the greatest works today. Oh yea, let us not forget the evils of music because that too has been such a negative impact on our children be it rock, country, rap or classical. Music has also been condemned though out the ages.

The problem is people ... if not TV then we would find another "thing" to blame little Johnny's problems on.

And why should TV be for only education and information?!?!? Why cannot it it be for what people want it to be such as entertainment? Are the masses so stupid that it must be dictated to them what they should and should not watch or have a right to watch?

"TV is a reflection of society and not the other way around"

Is this your opinion or a statement of fact? Does history make men or men make history? The answer is that it works in both directions (so life is imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating Elvis). There have been many studies on the impact of entertainment on behaviour and it has been found many times over that a lot of behaviour ans a sense of social norms is learned from media. The soaps are a reflection of real life? The families and characters are almost entirely dysfunctional -is this the way most people are in Thailand? I doubt there are quite so many rapes in real life per capita (though I could be wrong), but it engenders an acceptability. Often after the rape, the girl sleeps next to the man who raped her, and when she awakes is still frightened of him, but cowed and almost respectful. Maybe that is the way it is in "real" life, but only because those who behave that way don't know any other way. A few characters who break the societal norms might help to expose viewers to new ways of looking at things. It doesn't have to be a "messaqe", it can just be a character who doesn't behave predictably - a few new twists in the plot.

"The issues of light skin, lower class was all much worse here in Thailand BEFORE TV."

Really? Your gut feeling again, or a statement based on some evidence? You were in Thailand BEFORE TV? Or you have read studies about the before and after of television entertainment in Thailand?

But given that in the 20 years I have been here, the number and range of whitening products have grown exponentially, I find it hard to believe that light skin was a bigger issue before - I don't see how it could possibly be a bigger issue than it is now.

"Advertisers are not deciding what people watch but are TV programmers are programming for what people WANT to watch to make more money from advertisers."

Have you ever worked with Thai advertisers? I suspect not, because I have and can assure you that their involvement in the production of TV shows, magazine articles, etc., can run very deep. They see it as the one who pays the piper calls the tune - if we start letting pipers choose their own tunes, the natural order of things will be disrupted and the world as we know it will collapse. Trust me on this one, they can and do dictate all sorts of things, including storyline.

And this nonsense about what people WANT to watch - there is no quicker way of dumbing down a population than to give them what they want - to pander to their infertile imaginations - or to an advertiser's perception of what they want. When money is the only concern, quality suffers. Money's level is in the gutter, basically. It is, or should be the job of good producers, writers and directors to produce something the people didn't know they wanted (because they couldn't imagine it themselves), but something that challenges and entertains them. This would be an important aspect of encouraging the people of this country to start thinking for themselves.

You might want to try to educate yourself more on these subjects.

Sorry Mr jcbangkok, but how am I to do this exactly? I have worked in media for decades, so have a pretty reasonable background on the subject, along with a considerable amount of reading. (And what is your knowledge on the subject? I believe I already asked that but got no direct reply)

What I did above was question some of your assertions, and, giving you the benefit of the doubt as an intelligent, reasonable person, was prepared to hear well-argued answers. Sorry if you didn't have any responses ready to go that would have cut me down to size for daring to challenge you, but simply telling me that I need to try and educate myself more doesn't go a long way to making me look ill-informed or stupid. It does however go a long way to making you look like a petty-minded fellow who sees discussion as some sort of peeing contest. Pretty disappointing really.

Edited July 22, 2010 by zthyadat