Was my first thought when I saw the news headline “Red shirts accuse reporters of bias, seize broadcast vans”.
In the pleasant little world of my imagined flights of fancy I had visions of hoards of angry trekkies, frothing with geekish fury & dressed in costume of course, storming the news vans of a bunch of bewildered reporters. Maybe they had a large consignment of valuable memorabilia to shift and couldn’t afford van hire? or possibly the red shirts might have been attracted to the van’s dish & other high tech kit, maybe some sort of effort to make a life size model of one of the Enterprise’s shuttles was afoot?
Wrong sort of red shirts, apparently this type don't need to steal vans, what with living in space and all.
Sadly, as is so often the way with my inane day dreams, the truth turned out to be not nearly so fun or frivolous.
The news piece is actually about Thailand’s United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) movement, who are known as red shirts. It would seem that things are quite tense over there at the moment, with recent clashes between UDD protestors and soldiers at rallies held by the movement.
This obviously begs the question of why UDD members would be hassling reporters, generally, if you’re trying to be a popular movement you’d think it might be wise not to antagonise the media too much.
Actually though, that is exactly the source of some UDD members’ anger, claims that major news stations are being biased in their reporting of the UDD’s activities & heavily favouring the Thai govt’s position.
Anyway things boiled over at a UDD protest on Saturday and the media were asked to leave, but some of the protestors followed the media, and forced at least one crew to abandon their van.
However it seems that no-one was too badly hurt, and calmer heads soon prevailed amongst the UDD, with one of the movement’s leaders asking the media to continue covering UDD events, & urging UDD members to let the media get on with their jobs in peace.
So, sadly, there’s no point running to the Thai version of the Exchange and Mart to look for high tech bargains in the Used Vans section.
Tags: News, red shirts, Thailand