ABSTRACT
After the election of Thai Rak Thai (Thai Loves Thai) in January 2001 a drive towards reordering society began in Thailand. A moral reform stance opposed to drugs, corruption and the sex industry was launched in 2001 by then Interior Minister Purachai Piumsomboon and continued thereafter by Deputy Interior Minister Pracha Maleenont. Thaksin also favoured social order, moral order and media order. This new tendency has shifted the democratization process backwards and acted as the cultural background to a new authoritarianism. The effect of creating virtual ‘moral panics’ by governments, such as Thaksin’s concerning drugs or Mahathir’s about youth delinquency and crime, was to support their own agendas and direct public opinion away from potentially troublesome issues. The political manipulation of such ‘law and order’ campaigns was nothing new, of course, and not restricted to Asian states. In the 1970s Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall introduced the concept of ‘moral panics’ to explain how the British media reinforced public anxiety about social problems, including brawls between rival urban youth gangs and conflicts over Britain’s nonwhite minorities. Cohen, Hall and other critics argued that the media exaggerated community fears about disruptions to the social order, whether these were race riots, gang conflicts or IRA terrorist attacks. Although many subsequent arguments about how the media propagate violence have been sterile, this theme about how media framing of issues can promote moral panics and be used by interest groups to set their own agendas retains considerable force.1
