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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.

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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: sursc@yahoo.com