Two decades ago, I regularly read several magazines when I was far away from home and need to keep up to date of what 's happening at home on the other side of the globe. I remember that most of the time whenever there was news about my country, on any media though, it 's usually a bad news, or kind of tasty news favored by foreign reporters that tried to show how stupidly-looking or uncivilized my country or society was.
Today I just found the news that the current issue of the Economist magazine will not be available for sale in Thailand, due to self-censoring by the local distributors. I was curious and checked out some of the their articles. As usual, the articles hastily summed up decades of political history in Thailand based on foreigners' viewpoints. A number of "facts" presented in them were not accurate. No value of oriental culture were weighed in their analysis and the writers were not aware of the spiritual state or beneficial mindfulness of some Thai people they mentioned. Nor did they elaborate how disgustingly corrupt some Thai politicians were. I don't agree to a number of the authors' viewpoints. In Thai language, we have a catch phrase, "wrote things up after just staring at the candle flame (in a meditation)", which means that the writers were not inside the situation and wrote things up by their imaginations from a far away place. In general, I found the articles to have rude tone and not worth reading by Thais. I did not bother to post a counter comment at their website but to write my blog here instead.
Note added:-
Few days later (after the initial post), Thailand 's Foreign Ministry send a protest letter to the magazine 's about the publishing of two articles as distorting and explained the issues. I doubt that the authors or the editor(s) "got" it (inside their brains), but I do not care.
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