Community Radio In Thailand

Role and Status of Community Radio in Thailand.

∗

Surachai Chupaka

Brief history Community radio in Thailand has emerged by the Airwave Allocation Act 2000 relied on the Constitution in 1997. The act stated that twenty percent of all radio frequencies have to be reallocated for local communities nationwide to operate their own stations. The reallocation, however, has yet to be implemented due to uncompleted process of committee election and political turmoil during the past five years under the Thaksin’s government administration. Nevertheless, some initiative models of community radio broadcasting have been spilled over local communities nationwide, introduced by various academics and non governmental organizations since 2001. As a result, thousand of local people joined hands to establish their own community radio stations without any support from the government. For the model of those stations, local community generally applied micro radio transmitter for broadcasting to cover 30 kilometers in each area. In each station, 20 - 80 local people from various careers gathered hands to set up a committee to conduct the station under non-business oriented basis. Exploring Thai community radio.



It is the first time for local people in Thailand to be able to freely express their voices on airwave without any barriers. To examine the role and status of community radio in Thailand, the research method was designed by focusing on the operational, managerial and productive process of Thai community radio.

This article is a part of the research entitled “Role and Status of Thai community radio and people participation, 2006 funded by Ramkhamheang University of Thailand.

The study focused on the member stations of Thai Community Radio Federation which embrace with non-profit purpose, different from thousands of commercial micro-radio stations. It explores community radio exposure and relevant factors by investigating both sides as sender and receivers to find out role and status of Thai community radio towards community and society. The study synthesized various theoretical perspectives and observed the program production process of 21 stations in different regions. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to compare Thai community radio based on 4 different areas, namely urban, suburban, rural, and particular sub-cultural area. The role and status of community radio in Thailand as follows: 1. As the new media, Thai community radio has consequently become the second rank popular media exposure, higher rating than mainstream radio, while television is still on the top rank of exposure, except Bangkok Metropolitan area. However, the exposure bunches up in the entertainment program, especially music program. The main factors affecting community radio exposure are type of program and announcing style, local attachment, and demographic similarity between the sender and receivers. 2. Even though Thai community radio achieves high ranking exposure, it has still be unclear direction to meet the ideology of community media and public sphere principle. Many obstacles stemmed from the state hegemony through the repressive apparatus and ideological apparatus. 3. Amidst many problems and obstacles, the struggle of Thai community radio demonstrated grass-root spirit to build up their own broadcasting media. People participation is the core of Thai community radio operation, directly affected to its mission to serve public interest. 4. Thai community radio has a “medium” presence rather than crucial role and outstanding status as civic media. It is stemmed from insufficient participatory process limited on pseudo-participation, partly due to geographic obstacles. 5. The long term experiences on community development of local people is a tremendous factor to pave the way for the community radio to meet fully self-management as its ideology. The participatory learning process can be the key to enforce stability and improvement of community radio in foundation stage. Civic virtue emerged from those

experiences is the social engine to steer the community radio in all aspects as operating, broadcasting and participatory building.

The recommendation; To promote actual community radio broadcasting, the government must pay more attention to design some qualifications related to the civic virtue as basic requirement for local groups who need to set up the radio station rather than focusing particularly on technical regulation. In addition, joint committee composed by representatives of state and civil groups should be established at both central and regional levels to serve different community contexts. The relevant training courses and budget allocations should be provided by the local or regional committees to support local people to play active role in the radio station operation. Meanwhile, the central committee should not impose specific technical broadcasting, but only set available policy to prevent the radio from business-oriented operation. The government and relevant agencies must try to promote the role and status of Thai community radio to achieve public sphere and community media goals under local people participation principle. These measures will encourage and boost up local people in both sides senders and receivers to share public life together as citizen instead of consumer as the present dominant radio concept of capitalism.

Surachai Chupaka is a lecturer of Mass Communication Department, Faculty of Humanities, Ramkhamheang University, Thailand. Contact email address: [email protected]