Abstract

Journalists face a great number of pressures in their jobs; from their governmental and corporate sources, from legal restrictions, and occasionally from various actors involved in political turmoil in their country. It is generally assumed that indirect pressures are more acceptable and that direct intervention from the government/military is undesirable. The effects of military coups d’etat on journalists is an under-researched area, thus this study aims to examine this via interviews with journalists in Bangkok, Thailand after the 2014 putsch. It examines how they talk about the effects of direct and indirect control, especially from the junta. It finds that journalists talk about pressures on their work in similar way to journalists not in a post-coup environment, either naturalizing the new pressures or ignoring them and discussing their pressures in a way more consistent with the pre-coup environment. This situation raises important questions about the viability of the direct vs indirect control dichotomy on journalistic professionalism.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01296612.2020.1829858