The perturbing voice: Minority journalists and the struggle for journalistic legitimacy in Thailand’s Deep South

While scholarly attention to journalistic legitimacy is growing, most studies remain concentrated in the West, overlooking the experiences of journalists in the Global South. To redress this gap, this study draws on in-depth interviews with five Muslim minority journalists in Thailand’s Deep South who actively counter Thai state narratives through social media. It examines how these journalists perform boundary work to establish legitimacy while operating amid armed conflict, securitization, and intense state surveillance. The findings identify three emerging practices that enable these minority journalists to claim the role of “partisan truth-teller”. First, they employ social media to assert cultural authority as “partisan narrators” sharing close proximity to local communities marginalized by the Thai state. Second, they use such platforms to challenge the “views” of outsiders and resist the Thai public’s widespread distrust of Malay Muslims. Finally, they confront security authorities, thereby reclaiming citizen rights and advocating for the security of Malay Muslims. In contrast to Western models of journalism as “public service”, this study contends that legitimacy in this context derives mainly from the enactment of “truth” via “partisan and perturbing voices” that defend the rights of Malay Muslim communities in Thailand.