The challenge for community radio in Thailand: Diversity and pluralism

Thailand’s community radio sector encompasses a diverse array of stations, both religious and secular. This suggests the capacity to drive social transformation. However, while operational structures within these stations reflect a broad range of roles that potentially influence their formats and content delivery, programmes primarily emphasize entertainment, the dissemination of national and local information and news largely from official sources, as well as religious propagation. Political programming is largely absent. These limitations arise from a lack of diversity among station operators, the intentional avoidance of political issues, the absence of supportive affiliations, ambiguous licensing criteria and constraints in technical resources and transmission coverage. Rather than fulfilling its promise as radio ‘by the people, for the people’, current structures and roles suggest that community radio – especially people’s radio – is increasingly being sidelined, resulting in a less diverse and pluralistic media landscape and leaving rural areas and minorities without a voice.