Television Censorship in Thailand

Categorized | Living in Bangkok

Tags | bangkok cable television, cable in thailand, censored tv, censorship in asia, hbo, jesus, mm1, mm2, mnet movie channel, mnet movies, oh my god, south african cable, thailand cable

Television Censorship in Thailand

Posted on 19 June 2009 by Mike Behnken

Cable Television

I just got back from Malaysia where the censorship on television was very apparent. I knew about the censoship from reading about it in a Lonely Planet book and some websites. Censorship in Malaysia wasn’t a very big surprise because the country is primarily Muslim.

I wouldn’t think that Thailand would have the same level of censorship but I’m beginning to think that it may be the same or even worse. When I first got here my apartment had cable with about 30 channels in which Discovery, HBO, Cinemax and CNN were the only stations I watched.

MNET Movie Channels

Since I moved to my new apartment I have had to adjust to my new cable which has more than twice as many channels as the other apartment but is sorely lacking of HBO and most importantly CNN and the Discovery Channel.

The new apartment’s cable has channels from all over the world but has MNET MM! MM2 and MNet Action movie channels. Since there’s constantly commercials from South Africa I’m guessing that is where the channel is from. MNet’s movie channels have a pretty terrible selection of movies which is disturbingly censored.

Annoying Censorship

I have just watched a couple movies and the level of censorship is very annoying and almost ruins the movie. First I watched Generation Kill which is a HBO series about soldiers in Iraq which was not surprisingly censored of all the F-Bombs. On that show it completely ruined it because soldiers with bullets flying by their heads often swear.

I next watched the movie “I am Legend” starring Will Smith a PG-13 rated movie and I noticed that every time they said God it was censored out slopily often cutting out the word before and after God. Next was this chick flick called “Definitely Maybe” which had Gods, Christ and Jesus all censored out, while they said ass frequently. Again censoring the words out is very annoying because it usually overlaps the word and makes the movies very hard to understand.

Why

I’ve decided to post about this because I would like to know why? The only thing I can think of is the station may be run by a conservative South African Christian company as South Africa is 80% Christian. I would like to leave this post with a statement MNET (MM!, MM2, Mnet Action) channels suck. And a question: Does anyone know any better cable provider in Thailand or why MNet channels are censored?