In a move that seems more in tune with heartless and cruel corporations, the Thai government closed down and laid off the entire workforce of channel TITV without bothering to tell any of the workers. They showed up in the morning to find they were without jobs. From the wreckage, a new channel called TPBS (like PBS except..Thai!) has been setup and is now hiring new people to fill positions. No mention of severance pay to the former workers was made.
From the Bangkok Post:
…Mr Khwansuang stressed that the new station would adhere strictly to the principles of public television and be independent, balanced, transparent and accountable.
Thank you for throwing out a whole bunch of buzzwords that Thailand has heard about a million times before. And out of those million times, 0.0000% of those utterences was actually adhered to. The last two in that list, transparent and accountable, are the most damning. Firing an entire channel’s worforce without even a hint of a warning doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of transparency, and ruining the lives of many of those workers who now have no income but still have bills and mouths to feed hardly seems accountable at all.
But at least it’s nice to see when the powers that be lie about ethical principles, that they break their promise immediately and out in the open as opposed to trying to hide the fact and denying anything wrong happened after the news comes out a year or so later after the fact.
Bravo TPBS, you are the epitome of Thainess.
