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[B.I.G.]

"Media and civil society activists have expressed concerns over the National Broadcasting of Thailand's rerunning of scenes of the bloody clashes on Saturday between government forces and the red shirts, saying it could stir up more hatred and distrust in the country.

Darunee Hiranrak, a former dean of Chulalongkorn University's faculty of mass communications, said the state-run TV channel's repeated airing of the violence was like ''rubbing salt into the wounds''.''If they don't want to see the political crisis getting worse, they should stop broadcasting such programmes and pictures right away,'' Mrs Darunee said.

She demanded that the government report both sides of the clash to give its audience well-rounded information.
The NBT has come under fire from the media and civil society activists, as well as the red shirt demonstrators, for repeating the same programmes and pictures of the clashes several times a day since Saturday.The footage and talkshow programmes feature mainly soldiers wounded or killed and the hooded men who opened fire on them and demonstrators.

The NBT has also interviewed military officers and government figures who constantly deny the government used real bullets to disperse the protesters and claim the violent attacks were the work of ''terrorists''. . .Supinya Klangnarong, vice-chair of the Campaign for Popular Media Reform, said instead of reporting biased information and rerunning the same programmes and pictures of the clashes, the NBT should invite people from all walks of life to discuss proposed political solutions.''Even the red shirt representatives and the government opponents must get invited,'' Ms Supinya said.

The media freedom advocates warned that if the government continued to direct NBT's broadcasting in such a one-sided way, the situation in the country would deteriorate even further. However, PM's Office Minister Sathit Wongnongtoey, who supervises the government's media policies, defended the NBT's programming.

Mr Sathit insisted the NBT only reported the facts of the melee. The station had not distorted any information relating to the events. The NBT repeated the pictures and programmes to allow its audience to ''see and judge for themselves what they should believe''. ''We work under the rule of law and the emergency decree. We are reporting the factual information to counter the red shirt's media,'' Mr Sathit said.

The United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship has blasted out at the state-run TV for trying to mislead the public into believing that the red shirt people opened fires at the soldiers.Chatuporn Prompan, one of the UDD's leaders, told the crowd on Monday's night that the NBT should take a lesson from the past people's uprisings, when demonstrators burnt down the Public Relation Department out of angered that it had been used as the government's propaganda tool."

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/3604...lead-to-payback