In September 2006, when the military overthrew the government of Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a bloodless coup, the Thai-language press had little to offer in the way of coverage or criticism. (This may have been due to the presence of soldiers in many newsrooms around the country.) Arthit Suriyawongkul, a native of Bangkok working in Germany at the time, learned of the coup from a newspaper while on a train. Desperate for firsthand accounts of what was happening back home, he scoured Web sites of the Thai-language press. “All I could find was positive coverage, with lots of photos of people celebrating and handing flowers to soldiers,” he says. Eventually, he found what he was looking for— in the Thai blogosphere, where citizen reporters delivered what the Thai press would not (or could not)—a flurry
of news dispatches and opinion pieces

The debate over citizen journalism in the U.S. tends to dwell, tediously, on whether citizen reporters can supplant, rather than complement, the professional press. But in many countries around the world, where the press is under government control, corrupt, or simply incompetent, citizen journalists may be the only source of information that is reasonably credible. Without citizen reporters in Myanmar, for instance, it would have been impossible to know what was happening during anti-government demonstrations last year, while in the Middle East, bloggers have become a viable alternative to the heavily censored, state-run media.

In Thailand, says CJ Hinke, a retired academic associated with Thammasat University in Bangkok and the international coordinator for Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, “people perceived that they could write better about what was really going on than the mainstream Thai media, which have traditionally been censored.” He estimates that Thailand has a minimum of seven hundred blogs—most written by...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.