Write and edit with online readers  needs and habits in mind. Web usability studies show that readers tend to skim over sites rather than read them intently. They also tend to be more proactive than print readers or TV viewers, hunting for information rather than passively taking in what you present to them.

Think about your target audience. Because your readers are getting their news online, chances are they are more interested in Internet-related stories than TV viewers or newspaper readers, so it may make sense to put greater emphasis on such stories. Also, your site potentially has a global reach, so consider whether you want to make it understandable to a local, national or international audience, and write and edit with that in mind.

2. THINK FIRST � AND THINK DIFFERENT

Before you start reporting and writing, ask yourself: What is the essence of the story I am trying to tell? Then think about what the best way is to convey that story, whether through audio, video, clickable graphics, text, links  or some combination. Collaborate with audio, video and interactive producers. Develop a plan and let that guide you throughout the news gathering and production process, rather than just reporting a story and then adding various elements later as an afterthought.

Look for stories that lend themselves to the Web  stories that you can tell or differently from or better than in any other medium.

3. TAILOR YOUR NEWS GATHERING

Just as print and TV reporters interview differently because they are looking for different things, so must online journalists tailor their interviewing and information gathering specifically to their needs.

Print reporters tend to look for information. TV reporters look for emotion on camera, sound bites and pictures to go with words. Online journalists must constantly think in terms of different elements and how they complement and supplement each other: Look for words to go with images, audio and video to go with words, data that will lend itself to interactives.

Remember that photos look better online when shot or cropped narrowly, and streaming video is easier to watch when backgrounds are plain and zooming minimal. Tape interviews whenever possible in case someone says something that would make a powerful clip. Look for personalities who could be interesting chat guests. And always keep an eye out for information that can be conveyed more effectively using interactive tools.

4. WRITE LIVELY AND TIGHT

Writing for the Web should be a cross between broadcast and print – tighter and punchier than print, but more literate and detailed than broadcast writing. Write actively, not passively.

Good broadcast writing uses primarily tight, simple declarative sentences and sticks to one idea per sentence. It avoids the long clauses and passive writing of print. Every expressed idea flows logically into the next. Using these concepts in online writing makes the writing easier to understand and better holds readers attention.

Strive for lively prose, leaning on strong verbs and sharp nouns. Inject your writing with a distinctive voice to help differentiate it from the multitude of content on the Web. Use humor. Try writing in a breezy style or with attitude. Conversational styles work particularly well on the Web. Online audiences are more accepting of unconventional writing styles.

At the same time, don’t forget that the traditional rules of writing apply online. Unfortunately, writing quality is inconsistent throughout most online news sites. Stories suffer from passive verbs, run-on sentences, mixed metaphors and cliches. This is a result of fast-paced news gathering, short staffing and inexperienced journalists. This is also a big mistake. Readers notice sloppy writing and they don’t forgive. They’ll stop reading a story and they won’t come back for more. Unlike local newspaper readers, online readers have options.

5. EXPLAIN

Don’t let yourself get caught up in the 24/7 wire-service mentality and think all that matters is that you have the latest news as fast as possible. Speed is important online. But people want to know not just what happened, but why it matters. And with all the information sources out there now, in the end it will be the sites that explain the news the best that succeed. Write and edit all your stories with this in mind.

6. NEVER BURY THE LEAD

You can’t afford to bury the lead online because if you do, few readers will get to it. When writing online, it’s essential to tell the reader quickly what the story is about and why they should keep reading – or else they won’t.

One solution is to use a “Model T” story structure. In this model, a story’s lead – the horizontal line of the T  summarizes the story and, ideally, tells why it matters. The lead doesn’t need to give away the ending, just give someone a reason to read on. Then, the rest of the story – the vertical line of the T – can take the form of just about any structure: the writer can tell the story narratively; provide an anecdote and then follow with the rest of the story; jump from one idea to another, in a ‘stack of blocks’ form; or simply continue into an inverted pyramid.

This enables the writer to quickly telegraph the most important information and a reason to keep reading and yet still retain the freedom to write the story in the way he or she wants to.

7. DON’T PILE ON

Another story structure that has evolved online, mostly by accident, is what I call The Pile-On.

A common problem with online writing occurs in breaking news stories. In an effort to seem as current as possible, sites will often put the latest development in a story at the top – no matter how incremental the development. Then, they’ll pile the next development on the top, and then the next, creating an ugly mish-mash of a story that makes sense only to someone who has been following the story closely all day. Unfortunately, the only people who are usually doing so are the journalists. Few readers visit a site more than once a day. Remember this when updating stories, and always keep the most important news in the lead.

8. SHORT BUT SWEET

Most stories online are too long for a Web audience, and few readers finish them. Roy Peter Clark has written a wonderful essayarguing that any story can be told in 800 words – a good guideline for online writing.

But let that be a guideline, not a rule.  Readers will stick with longer stories online if there is a compelling reason for a story to be that long – and if it continues to captivate their attention.

Making readers scroll to get to the rest of a story is generally preferable to making them click. Online news users do scroll. If someone has clicked to get to a page, it’s generally because they want to read the story, and thus chances are high that they will. The Poynter eyetrack study showed that about 75 percent of article text was read online – far more than in print, where 20 to 25 percent of an article’s text gets read, on average. Print readers have less vested in any given story, because they haven’t done anything proactive to get the article.

9. BREAK IT UP

Larger blocks of text make reading on screens difficult, and you’re more likely to lose readers. Using more subheads and bullets to separate text and ideas helps. Writing should be snappy and fast to read. Keep paragraphs and sentences short. Like this.

Try reading sentences aloud to see if they’re too long. You should be able to read an entire sentence without pausing for a breath.

It also helps to extract information into charts, tables, bulleted lists and interactive graphics. Even a simple box with a definition or summary can help break up text and convey information in an easy-to-read format.

10. ELIMINATE THE GUESSWORK

People often don’t know what they’re going to get when they click on stuff. And people are not going to click on something unless they know what they’re getting.  When they click on something that’s not worth it, they lose trust in you as a source and are less likely to come back and click on things in the future. So make sure you tell people what they’re going to get.

Studies show online news users preferred straightforward headlines to funny or cute ones. Cute headlines didn’t do as good a job of quickly explaining what a story is about and thus discouraged online users from clicking through.

11. DO NOT FEAR THE LINK

Don’t be afraid to link. Many sites have a paranoid fear that if they include links to other sites, readers will surf away and never return. Not true! People prefer to go to sites that do a good job of compiling click-worthy links – witness Yahoo!’s success. If people know they can trust your site, they will come back for more.

At the same time, journalists have a responsibility to apply news judgment and editorial standards to the links they choose. Avoid linking to sites with blatantly false information or offensive content. Select links that enhance the value of the story by helping readers get additional information from the people behind the news.

And of course, link to related stories on your site, past and present. This is truly one of the advantages of the Web. By linking to other stories to provide context and background, writers have more freedom to focus on the news of the day without bogging stories down with old information.

12. TAKE RISKS . . . BUT REMEMBER THE BASICS

Online journalism is a new and evolving industry and we are writing the rules as we go along. Challenge yourself and your colleagues to question the way things are being done and to stretch the boundaries of what can be done. There are no rules, only ideas. Take risks. Try something different.

But don’t forget the fundamentals of journalism. Facts still have to be double- and triple-checked; writing still needs to be sharp, lively and to the point; stories should include context; and ethical practices must be followed. Don’t let the 24/7 speed trap and the new tools distract you from these basics.

With so many alternative news sources now at everyones’ fingertips thanks to the Web,  it is now more important than ever that we stick to the fundamentals of journalism to produce news people can trust, because in the end that’s what will keep people coming back for more.

Since their first album – the classic Drifting To Valhalla – did so well on the net since its release in 2009, the band Billy The Mountain have taken a little time to produce the second album Tides of Mercy.  This latest work of 14 songs also promises to do some serious business across the Web, with the band’s fan base growing by the month as word gets out that it is high time this ‘cult’ band was getting its amazing music to a wider global audience – as if 300,000 fans around the world was not enough to qualify them as a ‘global’ phenomenon! A truly great band and two great albums…watch as they really DO go global!

Technology has an important role to play in music today. Have we gone too far?

The blues band shuffling nonchalantly onstage look like they could use a shave and their battered guitars and shabby equipment complete a picture of rustic standards at best. Not surprisingly expectations are correspondingly low that they are going to sound like much. But what’s that on the floor in front of the guitarist? Tiny blue and red LED lights flash on and off on the board of small metal boxes at his feet as he takes his first solo. And what a solo! The sound of his ostensibly old guitar is suddenly finely tuned and breaking through the air with a beautifully produced tonal complexion matching the best violins and the newest guitars?

Fooled again?

While he may indeed look casual and indifferent in his onstage attitude, the fact is that the guitarist has taken a lot of time to sound so good and has paid careful selection to finding the right effects pedals to produce this beautiful, bluesy guitar sound reminiscent of the best recordings of his heroes such as Scott Henderson or Robben Ford.

Guitarists pay thousands of Baht and yes – even dollars – in pursuit of the ‘right’ sound. The best effects pedals they hunt down sometimes cost hundreds of dollars, but yield that wonderful ‘warm’, ‘smooth’, ‘silky’ sound they seek and thus emulating pioneering guitar heroes like Hendrix and Eric Clapton. The pedals in some cases actually emulate the creamy tones associated with the hard-driven tube amps of yesteryear, hard-wired vacuum tube amps which provide the quintessential overdriven sound that guitarists crave – amps with names like Marshall, Fender and Dumble.

Helpfully for cash-strapped guitarists, the pedal makers claim to reproduce those sweet tones by hooking up their pedals to virtually any amp, thus cutting out the need to buy and carry expensive branded and heavy amplifiers and cabinets around from gig to gig. Everything is in the pedal and its ‘secret’ electronics, and these ‘ideal’ FX pedals can be carried to any gig in the guitarist’s gig bag and combined with other effects to produce that ‘amazing’ sound.

And this is no casual pursuit. Guitar stores today dedicate as much as half of their store floor space to accommodate the huge selection of pedals on offer today from all corners of the globe. Many are made by the manufacturers of guitars anxious to garner knock-on sales from artists who favour branded. Products. But most FX pedals today are analog effects pedals, hand-made by enthusiasts who reckon they can combine certain chips, capacitors and other essential electronic components to get ‘that sound’ guitar players crave.

Basically a pedal – often called a stomp box – is an electronic effects unit housed in a small metal or plastic chassis used by musicians operating the pedal via a footswitch to modify their instrument’s sound. Even musicians playing electronic keyboards, organs, the electric bass, or electric violin use effects pedals. In all instruments the pedals help alter the sound quality or timbre of the input signal adding effects such as distortion, fuzz, overdrive, chorus, reverberation, wah-wah, flanging, phaser or pitch shifting. The sound of a guitar or other instrument that is played without an effects pedal is described as “clean” or “dry.”

Musicians refer to them as pedals because they sit on the floor and have large on/off switches on top that are activated using the foot. Some pedals, such as wah-wah or volume pedals employ what is known as an expression pedal. Expression pedals are manipulated while in operation by rocking a large foot-activated potentiometer (pot) back and forth. The relative position of the expression pedal changes some parameter of the effect, such as a filter response in a wah pedal.

The pedals allow the musician to activate and deactivate the effects uninterrupted and almost invisibly while playing the instrument and some musicians use rack-mounted effects processors, since the greater size of the rack and pedal combinations allows more processing power and a correspondingly huge variety of sounds or ‘effects’.

But what about the pop bands that have a totally professional sound but you can hear trumpets and saxophones and even more drums and other sounds filling out the sound the actual musicians on stage deliver and make a five or six-piece band sound like a 12-man showband?

For most professional musicians going out live and anxious to produce the most authentic ‘cover’ of the chart-topping songs they know the audience wants to hear, they employ software sequencers running on laptops or Macs. These mini studios on a laptop hard disk employ MIDI technology and nowadays a software sequencer will perform the required tasks for a live concert admirably.

The hard disk sequencer runs back pre-recorded songs and accompaniments pre-programmed from downloads or written using MIDI or proprietory softwares. These drive the keyboards and trigger at the appropriate beat or note in the song, rhythm programming, drum sounds, bass, organ, synth sounds and most other instruments including piano and entire brass sections, often employing plug-in modules and even portable racks with virtual eight-channel powered mixers and more.

While many musicians despise the technology for ‘stealing jobs’ and ‘faking it’ others believe it’s the best way to expand the band’s sound and appeal by providing an authentic audio representation of the often complex hit songs they cover. After all, all you require from a sequencer on the live stage is that it stores MIDI data generated in the studio and play it back.

So the next time you party at the local hop or any other downtown club or go see some great band sounding like something off MTV, you’ll know why they sound so good.

And imagine the same application of smooth technology to a Britney Spears or Madonna concert and suddenly it all makes sense why it sounds so slick and sophisticated and full – “just like the record”.

Here the concert sound engineers have the complete show pre-recorded on digital hard disks and very sophisticated sound mixing desks to control and fine-tune the entire output. The show runs to a set time-line, beat-by-beat and even note-by-note with the engineers in complete control of the onstage sound, each instrumentalist, and the auditorium mix, even tweaking the vocalist’s pitching of a note and running lip-sync (short for lip synchronization) – a technical term for matching lip movements with recorded voice.

Lip-synching in the case of live concert performances is generally considered controversial although in many instances it is justified from a production standpoint to ensure quality for broadcast, or to help a performer harmonize with their own vocals. But many despise the practice calling it a kind of fraud.

...from left, County Down singer Tommy Sands, folklorist Mick Moloney sitting

This interview with Tommy Sands was conducted February 11, 1994 by none other than the mighty Irish troubadour Mick Moloney himself. We are honoured he slipped us this historical document for all to read.

MM: I’m here on the 11^th of February 1994, talking to Tommy Sands. We’re going to talk about songwriting, but first of all, I’ll ask you, Tommy, when you were born and where.

TS: At 11 o’clock in the morning, the third of seven; born in Newry on the 19^th of December 1945.

MM: You’ve been around a fair bit.

TS: I’ve been around a fair bit, Mick, yes.

MM: Of course, I know you primarily as a singer-songwriter, entertainer, storyteller and that. Was that always your main occupation or did you do other things fulltime before that?

TS: Well, at home there was always that going on. My mother’s people—my mother played the accordion, but her father was a poet, a local poet, and his poems would still be recited by the children in the area of [Burn]. My father’s people all played the fiddle. He had five uncles that played the fiddle and five aunts who were… what was called ‘diddlers’ or ‘lilters.’ And they would play at local dances and different houses. When I was growing up there was a lot of music in the house, neighbors coming in… that was one… I suppose my earliest memory would have been being put to bed early and the light of an oil lamp and the music leaking under the bedroom door. By the time I was old enough to stay up, I knew a lot of the songs, the music and the tunes that I could hear.

I went to a seminary, actually, after leaving secondary school, and I suppose a lot of us went to seminaries around home. I had a couple of uncles… I had three uncles who were priests; one went to China and one went to Africa, and one went to the Philippines. I suppose they would send back cards and Christmas cards, photographs of people pulling bananas off trees, and it was all very romantic. I had an uncle who was captured by Mao Tse Tung in China, and he was a popular man around home. I suppose that must have been—I suppose at that age, you want to do something useful, you think, with your life. So I went to a seminary. I certainly don’t regret going, and I don’t regret leaving it either. But I suppose I learnt a little bit about reading and writing there. Then when I got out of that, I taught for a couple of months, and then we won a competition in Dublin, the family did. [I] went to New York and left the job, more or less, and I’ve been in music in one shape or form since that.

MM: Now, first I heard of you was as a member of the Sands family. How did that all come about?

TS: Well, funny enough, when I decided to leave the seminary, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The people at home didn’t know I was leaving either, and as you know, at that time it wasn’t so easy to leave, and I had done five years in the place. So I decided to walk home, and it was a walk of about… well, about maybe 100 miles, I suppose. The reason I walked home was because I was trying to decide what I was going to do. I was looking over the ditches and I saw the men working with the hay and I wondered if I would be working at hay—I didn’t know what I was going to do. But just as I arrived in Newry, I met a taxi with the family in it—Colm and Ben and Dino—Eugene (we used to call him). They were going to Gormanston to do a concert there for the people who had been burnt out of their homes in Belfast. They rolled down the window and they didn’t say ‘where are you going’ or anything else, they said, ‘your guitar is in the back. Would you like to come and play? So I did.

And in a strange way, that was… that had a certain part in the decision as well, to play the music. And then of course, family played, as you said, and we played at home first, then local halls, then we played in Dublin a little bit, and we made some records, going to America and then back home again. Went to Europe—for a long time, we did most of our playing in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, East Germany and Czeckloslovakia… and of course, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, in the west, in western Europe.

MM: When I first heard the Sands family on record, I thought it was a good record; it didn’t seem to be, to me, particularly unusual or different from a lot of the other ballad groups that were around at the time. And then the next time I heard you and Colm, years later, it was totally different. It seemed in the earlier records, the material was fairly standard and [with] a fairly standard approach. And then when I heard you years later, there were different songs, your own songs… it seemed something had changed. How did that all happen?

TS: Well, I think that we started to write songs very early on. In fact, we didn’t even think about recording them. The first record we made was for a record company in Belfast and they wanted us to do some songs from around the Mournes, and some songs that didn’t really suit us all that well. We had already been writing some songs, very simple ones—maybe about events that had happened on the farm at home. But they would be interesting for the audience we had at the time, who were local farmers, basically. So we were very much playing for the local farmers—maybe a frog jumped into someone’s well when the corn was being cut; so that was a relevant thing to write about. Of course, we were singing the usual songs about the pretty fair maids in the month of May, but when July and August happened in ‘68 and ’69 and people were getting killed, the whole Troubles were beginning to affect us very much. It was very difficult to ignore that in things that we wrote.

We started writing basically after internment. There was a series of concerts organized to raise money for the dependents of the internees, because there was no breadwinner in the house. There was a very large, enthusiastic audience at these concerts, who were very interested in the idea of civil rights—of course, begged [for] it. They were looking for some hope and encouragement. So a lot of the early songs we wrote would have been very much with that in mind. In fact I remember one night, one of the first songs we wrote about that—we were coming in in the car and of course, very often we would be stopped. The army might know that we were going to a concert, and they would stop us and hold us up. Very often we would arrive late or maybe not arrive at all for the concert. But I remember one night, we made a song up after being stopped, and we went on the stage with our coats on because we were late, and the song was

‘We’ve just been stopped by British soldiers on the way to town.

They took us all out of the car and searched us up and down.

Where are you from? Where do you go? We may not let you through.

Must we put up with soldiers who tell us what to do?

But right will conquer might, we’ll let the whole world know;

And we will work together and reap the things we sow.’

So I remember that as one of the first songs, and a lot of the songs then would really have been around that.

MM: Songwriting obviously is something that people have been doing in Ireland for centuries, otherwise there wouldn’t be as many songs around as there are. But only a few seem to be able to write songs that other people want to learn. An awful lot of people write songs they like to sing themselves, and it seems to me that you and your brother Colm have a gift for writing songs that are not only attractive to audiences and entertaining, but also attractive enough for other singers, including myself, to want to learn. I’m just wondering, what is it that makes a songwriter, do you think?

TS: I really don’t know, Mick. I’m very happy that I can string words together very well; I am very proud that people like yourself think they’re good enough to record. Absolutely! In fact, it was recordings that yourself and Robbie made which led people here to invite me over here, and it’s been very, very important for me. I think in writing songs, a lot of people, especially modern songwriters who don’t necessarily have a tradition to dip into, a lot of it would be very personalized stuff, and I think that sometimes people might be inclined to treat the audience like a rubbish bin, to dip… to throw their frustrations into. I think it’s very important to give the audience something they can identify with, for a start. It’s just… maybe like telling a story, a good story. A story that’s relevant is always that much better.

I remember coming home from school, when I was a child, we’d always have some news to bring home. We’d sit down breathless after walking the three mile[s] home, in fact, and everybody would… we’d save up certain news, and we would say, ‘that’s my news, and right, that’s your news.’ Something else is somebody else’s news. And we’d sit down and try to tell that news. Even then, we felt that it was important in order to keep our parents’ attention you’d have to let it out by degrees—keep their concentration and suspense as well. And I think it’s a bit like that in a song; it’s a bit like that in any art form, maybe spoken art form, anyway. Or even in a film. I’m always very interested in what other people have to say too. I remember Hitchcock talking about suspense, about creating suspense; you need suspense all the time, I think. But he talked about the difference between fear and suspense. Fear was when the hero was about to be attacked, and he knew it and the audience knew it. But suspense was when the hero was about to be attacked, and the audience knew it but the hero didn’t know it. Shakespeare used the very same thing in Hamlet, for example. He knew there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, but he didn’t know what it was, but he knew there was something wrong.

So to create hunger for the story, a need for it… I think it helps an awful lot if you have something you really want to say, something you feel is important to say, and indeed, unfortunately, so many things happening around home that need to be said, and people haven’t said them enough, I think. So you’re kind of armed with that hunger to tell the story, for a start, and I think that helps an awful lot. I think there’s no point writing a song except if you have something to say, and very often people write songs that say nothing. I’m not saying people don’t have something to say, everybody has something to say. But very often, they don’t write about the important things that they have to say.

As well as that, I think you’re letting out the story the way you’d let out a grass rope, almost—bit by bit, bit by bit. Don’t tell it all at once, let it out a little bit and whet the appetite. I think that a chorus is very important as well, to let the audience become part of it. If an audience sings a song, they’re automatically committing themselves to the story, if they sing the chorus. I suppose the chorus, in a sense, is a little bit like the headline of a newspaper. It draws people’s attention to it, and it also restates what you’re saying in the song, but in kind of an opaque sort of way, because you can’t tell the end of the story in a chorus, what you’re striving for with the words, very often.

MM: What was the first song that you can ever remember writing?

TS: It’s a song about my father going to the bus. It’s called ‘The Half-eleven Bus.’ And there’s a parody. I remember hearing a song on the radio, I can’t remember what the song is called, but I know the air is… “It’s 11 on the clock and I’ve only on one sock; the bike’s punctured so you understand my rush; I’m for the town today, stand back and clear the way; for I’ve got to catch that half-eleven bus.’ The song is about my father going up the road, and lifting the bicycle, which he did fairly often, and the people he met—mentioning all the people he met on the road, so all the people on the road would be interested in that song. All the people on the road that I know of course would come into our house for sessions, and I think that is the first one I wrote. I wrote a few other things that meant nothing to anybody, so I quickly realized, you know, maybe—‘walking down the road and the rain is coming down on my head, and I’m feeling blue.’ I must have heard that on the radio; it really meant nothing to anybody, and to be quite honest, it meant nothing to me. It gave me no sense of healing or satisfaction, either.

MM: As somebody who’s never had either the ability or the urge—I’m not sure which would come first—to write a song. I’m curious as to what would make you want to express yourself through writing a song.

TS: Well, I think the first thing that made me want to write a song was that everybody in the house knew all the songs that were being sung. The old songs—there was a certain repertoire. It’s very hard to get… well, of course, someone would always come in with a new song, but it was important to have a new song. But I felt that the songs that we were singing, the songs my father would have song—indeed, emigration and lots of very important things—they were about real events, and they meant an awful lot to the people that wrote them. They mean an awful lot to us, too, looking back at it. But it must have meant an awful lot more to the people who wrote them and the people who were directly affected by it.

So I really set out to write something that the people in the room… I was always writing for people in a room, in a house, in a kitchen, that would move them and affect them. I was trying to find topics that did affect them and that I knew it did. For example, if the spuds were turning brown, if there were a couple of bad spuds in a ton of spuds that we’d spent weeks gathering and skipping and picking and all that, that was a very important event in the town land. So If I wrote a song about that, people really listened to it.

I think the first thing is that you must feel, you must feel the song, I think. It must be an important part of you, otherwise it won’t come out… well, some people of course—commercial songs are very different. There’s formulas for that. That’s very different. I don’t think those are the types of songs we’re talking about. I think you have to want to say something, in a certain situation. You want to need to say it enough to discipline yourself into actually sitting down and grabbing it by the neck, the same as learning an instrument. It takes a lot of discipline, an awful lot of work, and if it is just work, you never could have learned, except you get that great surge of enjoyment out of the learning of it. Because someone who doesn’t want to learn an instrument, like a child learning the piano that hates it, it’s a terrible, terrible thing to do.

So I think you must want, for a start, and you must have something to say, would be the next thing. And then, the actual formula for writing the song would be the third thing, I think. There’d be different ways of doing that. I would actually get a line; the way I would do it, I’d get a line—the first line of a chorus, usually. That would more or less—usually I’d start out with an idea for it anyway, that I wanted to write about, this particular event or that. So I’d get one line to sum it up—an opening line for a chorus, and even when I say that line, the inflection of the saying of it goes up and down, and there’s certain notes, natural notes involved in the saying of it, and the urgency of it. And I would just exaggerate those notes, or those inflections. In that way, I would get an air. I would very seldom write a song with an instrument in my hand because I think that would limit me right away—to try and use too many chords, and make it complicated. I would try to keep it as simple as possible.

MM: Did you ever do any kind of formal study of the craft or the structure of songwriting?

TS: I didn’t and I would like to. I did sit in on some songwriting workshops with Robbie O’Connell, for example, a man who is a great friend of ours, of course, and a man I admire very much. Robbie has it well structured out, and I’m always very interested in that. Usually what he says, after he says it, I say ‘yes that’s right’ although I wouldn’t have thought about formulating it that way. But no, I haven’t—I haven’t learned that. I think maybe just by… I think I would know what a good song was. At least I would know when I finished it that it was right, and how I came to that, I really haven’t formulated it, although sometimes I am called upon in workshops to do this sort of thing, so I really should sit down and formulate something. Actually, sitting and talking to you like this now is useful for me.

MM: So you had, I suppose, an instinctive, intuitive awareness of structure, would you say?

TS: Yes, I think so.

MM: Yes… because it doesn’t have to be formalized, but obviously you have the structure in your head because your songs are structured in a traditional way.

TS: Yes, there would be—I think—a bit like a story; for the most part, like a story. I think that if you write a song, it depends what way you direct the song, how the song will come out. If you’re singing to a big audience and you’re writing a song that you know you’re going to be singing to a big audience, especially a non-English speaking audience, it must be—out of necessity—very simple. A lot of the songs I wrote in the past number of years would have been directed very much towards a non-English speaking audience. So I would have a chorus—a very simple chorus, like ‘sailing through the sky’ for example.

I remember going to Moscow to do a concert for the refugees of the Armenian earthquake, and at that I knew nobody would understand one word of English. So I had a chorus they could sing; actually, I repeated the word ‘Armenia’ a lot of times, and then I had things I wanted to say in the verse. That’s the extreme thing, to a non-English speaking audience. But to a big audience, when you have to get down to the lowest common denominator, the simplest common denominator—not to go over the head of…

They say in writing news, that you shouldn’t write (for the newspapers or the news readers in the radio stations, I’d be talking to the people who write the news)… they say that you shouldn’t write anything that a thirteen year-old can’t understand, because they’re appealing to a very, very wide audience. The same with a song; it’s appealing to a very wide audience. There would be the odd song that would different from that, that would be more specific, maybe. But it would depend on the kind of… where you were looking when you sang this song.

MM: Do you think your songwriting has been influenced in any way by your travels to Eastern Europe and non-English speaking countries?

TS: I think so. I’ve always been very interested in some of the French songwriters, their way of telling a story; from Jacques Brel to… even George Moustaki, even Theodore Bikel, a Greek songwriter who wrote a lot of film music—of course, ‘Zorba’ and all of that sort of stuff. I spoke to him about the same thing, and most of his stuff is political—most of his songs are political songs. Victor Jara songs as well; I was very much moved by his songs—Chilean songwriter. So I think I would have been. It was Eastern Europe that I met those people; I never met Victor Jara, I met his wife, Joan. But people who are coming from a situation of struggle, and who in a sense, are giving a voice to the voiceless, if you like, to their people—in a sense, a lot of songs came out of that.

MM: Is there a big difference in your thinking between poetry and song?

TS: Well, I would see them as different things. A poem rarely stands up as a song, and vice versa, because a song can be one word repeated a lot of times, but they’re both the same in the sense of an emotional purchase. They would be appealing both to the soul and the logic, the brain. The song, in particular, even more than the poem, I think. I often see… I often talk to painters, and we talk about the same thing, about trying to put something across. They talk about the drawing part of it, and the colors. There would be different artists who would be strong in drawing and not as strong as a colorist. For example, the French Impressionists, Gaugin, in particular. Not such a great drawer, but of course, a wonderful man in color. The drawing would appeal to the logic side of the brain, and the colors would appeal to the emotional side.

The same way with song; the words would be a logical side, making sense out of it all, and the air would be the real moving force, the emotional factor. I think that’s why a song is very strong in changing things, because you can tell someone easily what they should do; I could be told what I should do, and logically I know that I should do that, but if my heart is not with it, it doesn’t have the effect that it should have. I think that’s why a song can move, because it’s got that other element in it. Of course, a poem can do it too, with its use of sense of smell, colors… getting right into the senses. It can do that. But a song can do it even more so, I think.

MM: You mentioned some songwriters you admire. Who are your favorite songwriters?

TS: I think…

MM: Ones that have influenced you?

TS: Yes. I think people like Pete Seeger have influenced me a lot. Not so much as a songwriter, but… yes, as a songwriter—a man with ideas, with great ideas. In fact, there is a song that I’m writing at the minute, when I was up in his house the last time, he gave me a few great ideas, and I started to write a song and I rang him up and I sang part of the song to him and he was very interested to hear the rest of it. Pete Seeger certainly would be one person. Funnily enough, my brother Colm as well—his songs influence me, and vice versa. People like Mickey O’Connell, I think, is a great songwriter. A lot of the modern songwriters people regard as poets and as songwriters. I must say, I’m missing out. They don’t move me, and that’s something that’s obviously my problem, because a lot of these modern songwriters move thousands and thousands of people. But somehow, I’m left cold with them. But people like Victor Jara as well; I don’t speak Spanish but Katrine does and she often translates stuff for me. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet as well. Very often, novelists would influence me as well.

MM: It seems that there’s one thing in common with the people you’ve talked about—a lot of songs that they write come out of oppression.

TS: Yes, that’s true. I think that

[tape break]

TS: Maybe in a sense, that’s an Irish legacy, too. I know that a lot of the songs that we would have been singing when we were growing up would have been relating to that, and giving a voice to the voiceless, again. I think that the revolution… in ’68 and ’69, there was a revolution going on that spurred all sorts of thoughts, because it makes you think. And whenever you think, you want to put across those thoughts to someone else. Like as we were talking about, standing at the top of the Grand Canyon, you say, ‘well, look at that!’ Even though everybody else is looking at it! You’ve got an urge to share even that one vision with people, and in the situation of oppression, we’d be sitting in the pub after the Civil Rights march or even in the present time, talking mainly about hope—you know… where do we go from here?

And also with people, some of whom might have been very depressed; they’d gotten nothing out of the whole thing… to show that it is worthwhile, somewhere along the line. I know you have to step outside of it a little bit because sometimes it is a luxury to be objective in anything, and when you’re right in the middle of it, it’s difficult. I often write songs when I’m away from home, on planes—being physically removed from it all… having the chance to gather it together and look at it a little bit from afar.

MM: Do you ever write songs about things that are non-Irish or part of your immediate experience at home?

TS: I do. I’ve been very moved by… well, I’ve written songs about Chile, for example. I’ve written songs about Dresden, Eastern Germany. I’ve written songs about the charitable thing, and I’ve just finished a song about a young girl in Japan, Sedaku [?], I mentioned earlier on. But also, I think recently I find that… maybe as I grow older… I find myself writing about all these things like my parents; my mother in particular, who I just finished writing a song about. I suppose even though she’s Irish and I’m Irish, it is universal, that particular theme. In many ways, growing up in Northern Ireland is a great thing because—not only the struggle going on there and the division going on there, it’s a microcosm in the sense for a much wider world. But indeed, growing up on a farm and seeing the seed and planting it, and the harvest reaped; in many ways, it is a poetic microcosm of a much wider thing, too. I would tend to use that sort of imagery, the imagery that I would be very, very familiar with in a non-dispute sort of a way, that I know exactly what I’m talking about, and apply that to wider principles.

MM: A lot of the songs you write are funny. Where does that part of the songwriting vision come in?

TS: I think it’s very important to laugh, and I think it’s also… I like to laugh myself, and I love hearing jokes and I love telling jokes. I think serious subjects don’t have to be serious. I think sensitive subjects—if you treat them with an edge, you get an edge back. But if you treat them with gentleness and above all, humor—you can sing them anywhere. I’ve noticed in doubtful enough situations in Belfast, for example, where it will be a mixed audience and people would be very sensitive and they’d be listening to every word that you said. If you get them laughing, you can say anything. For example, the song when Humpty Dumpty is pushed, it’s a bit absurd and it’s a bit funny, and people will laugh at it. At the same time, it’s putting across a very vicious message, at the same time. Or the mixed marriage song is another one, you know, about a Catholic and a Protestant getting married, and it sends up the division in a pretty irreverent way, but I think humor is very important. Not only to put across messages, but because humor itself is very important, and laughing your head off is absolutely vital.

MM: Well, I think the mixed marriage song is dark humor… I can’t remember who said it but I heard dark humor described as the most effective kind of humor because it changes the meaning of the situation without changing the situation.

TS: Yes, that’s very good. That’s very apt. Yes, it changes the whole thing all around, and people look at themselves from a different perspective. It’s a bit like… if you’re down up to your knees in muck, you feel very wet, but if you can imagine yourself sunning on a roof and looking down on someone in muck, it’s almost funny—even if it’s yourself. Of course, humor is… [there is] such a thin thread between humor and sadness. The man going up the street with a dickie bow, all dressed up, and he slips on a banana skin, and the more sophisticated he looks, the more hilarious it is. But if that man happens to be your father and he breaks his leg, it ends up suddenly very sad. Humor can pull people away from the immediacy of the situation and let them look at it in a fresh way.

MM: How many songs have you written? Do you have any sense of it?

TS: I think… not all that many; maybe about forty.

MM: What are your favorite ones?

TS: I think ‘There were Roses’ was one of my favorite ones because it’s a complete song. ‘Dresden’ is another one, which I think is a complete song. I think this one about a mother is a pretty good one too. The 1999 one is a good one. But ‘Humpty Dumpty’, I like that too. I think… I’m happy with them. I think it’s hard, in a sense, to differentiate them, because in a way, they’re a little bit like children to you. You spend so much time at them, and most of them I spend a lot of time at—maybe not quantity time but quality time. Whenever they’re finished, you know, you watch them heading off up the road on their own and you wonder what winding road they’re going to turn up, and very often, they’re up the road before you are, and they introduce you to people rather than you introduce them to people.

MM: When is a song finished?

TS: Well, you know when it’s finished. Very often, if a song of mine happened to be played on the radio or become popular or something, people say, well, you must be very happy now. Of course I am happy, but I’m really satisfied when I finish the song and I know it’s finished. I think it’s a rounded event; the circle is completed, in a sense, even though the song itself might end on a minor chord and ask more questions than it answers. As an entity, you know it’s finished, and you know when it’s good. Very often I go over to Colm and Colm comes over to me with a song saying ‘what do you think of that?’ And very often, I would suggest something to him or vice versa. 99% of the time we wouldn’t alter it in the slightest, because I might say to him, ‘there’s a word there that I wouldn’t have,’ but he will already have built the wall, and it’s just like taking a brick out of the wall, and it’d fall. He would know why it was there even though he couldn’t really say it, maybe.

MM: That’s interesting. Do you ever go back and rewrite the songs?

TS: One. One song. One of the first songs I ever wrote that was recorded, I wrote in the seminary. It was called ‘I Hate to Hear People Cry.’ Looking back at it now, I don’t think it makes sense to anybody. It doesn’t make sense to me. It was written very much in the style of the 60’s; full of hidden meanings and that sort of thing. I want to get away from that. I think it was straight up as a sort of a poem, but I don’t like… I think it’s a very selfish thing, to come out with something that sounds good but means very little to anybody. I rewrote that one and I’m recording that one, hopefully, on the next album.

MM: The [?] that you pick for your songs, do you try to stay within your own idiom of South Down, or do you try to get more universal than that?

TS: Well, I would stay very much within the idiom that I would use speaking and talking. I would feel uncomfortable with words… in fact, that’s one of the reasons why I rewrote that song. There’s one verse… I had been reading philosophy and psychology at the time… words, which after a lot of years living, didn’t come into my vocabulary. So generally it would be the words of South Down in many ways, but I have traveled so I am outside of that now, I am a different person to that, to an ordinary person in South Down, so I would feel comfortable using the words I normally use in speaking. But there’s a rhyming dictionary that you can buy, and I bought one of them but I very, very seldom use it, because I would already know the word anyway. I would use it to eliminate things. If I couldn’t think of some word, I might look it up, and all of the words I would see, either I would have already considered them and rejected them, or they would be all of the words that don’t fit into my language. So I have very much my own words.

MM: Which is this rhyming dictionary?

TS: You can buy this. You can buy a rhyming dictionary. I think Robbie introduced me to it. You get one word and you get all of the other words that rhyme with it. Or rather one sound, ‘speech’ for example—and you’d get the word ‘each.’ Well, speech is not a good example, but… ‘bag’ for example. You’d have rag, lag, all the other words, you know, going with that. You can buy them things. I like to have it even though I would very rarely use it.

MM: How long does it take you to write a song?

TS: It varies an awful lot. ‘There were Roses’ song, I was working on it for years. More or less working on the shape of it and the idea of it… Most of the time, it would take me maybe about two or three days, if I was well concentrated. There’s only a certain amount of time you can concentrate; you just have to leave it. About three days on a song, usually; some would come quicker than that. What I would regard as the big songs like ‘the Roses’ or ‘Dresden’ or ‘1999’, these last few songs about my mother and the Sedaku song, they would… I’d just be carving and chipping at them for a long time to get the right words, because such are the words to tell of it… words that are gentle enough in a certain moment or shocking enough in another moment.

MM: Here in America, of course, you are best known for ‘There were Roses’ and I know there’s an interesting story not only about why you wrote the song, which is the most dramatic part of it, which is the story the song tells, but also how the names of the people in the song changed. It’s interesting that when myself and Robbie recorded it, we have the original version, and you came out then singing a different version. And I know there’s a story behind that. I wonder if you could tell that.

TS: Yes. Whenever I recorded the song, it was put out as a single. I was to do it on the Late Late Show, which is a program in Dublin, that you know, Mick. Before I actually appeared singing the song, I decided to speak to two families involved, and I went to one of the families, a Protestant family, and they were very happy with it. But the Catholic family was very, very worried about it. The mother was very ill, for a start, and they thought if the mother heard Sean McDonald and them on the radio, that it would kill her. So I did not know what to do. I already had the song recorded, and I suppose a couple of thousand singles made. I remember Katrine was away from the house and I was in the house on my own, and I took down a bottle of whiskey and threw some whiskey into me and I said, ‘I really don’t know what I’ll do!’ Here was a song I thought I was going to have to never sing again! And I could have went on and sang it but it could have caused trouble and anyway, the whole idea of the song was compassion.

So I remember going in and I rang up the cardinal that same night. The cardinal, we were very good friends, and I often talked to him about all sorts of things. He also knew the family, and he said that he would talk to them because he thought it was important that the song should be sung. But then, I went to see Peter Makem, who was a very good friend of mine. Peter and me took another wee sup of whiskey each, but suddenly whatever chemistry was in the air between us—change the names! Now it seems so obvious, but it didn’t seem one bit obvious then, because I thought by changing the names it was going to destroy the whole power of the song, but than I thought, sure, very few people know the actual names anyway, so I decided to change the names.

I went into the studio and I kind of re-recorded it. I already had the music done, so I re-recorded that one line—there were a couple of lines, actually, in the song. I remember going up to the program, and into the make-up [room]; Gay Byrne, he was getting made up and I was getting made up. He had to rewrite his script and I had to try to remember the correct name, or the new names on the live program because it had only just changed. But I’m very glad that your version is the right names, in a sense, because it’s truer. But I promised the family that I wouldn’t, and even though the mother’s dead now, I still hold on to that.

MM: Have the families ever heard our version?

TS: Oh, they have, because they heard it played on the radio.

MM: What did they think of that?

TS: Well, I haven’t been speaking to the O’Donnells, but I think they’re happy with it, because they’re sufficiently removed from it now. Although they went through a hard time; their cousins… they had two or three cousins shot as well. They were very nervous about the whole thing at the time. The thing is, your version has been recorded now by several people, including Sean Keane—so that’s played quite often on the radio.

MM: One last thing; it seems to me that the songs that you and Colm (though I won’t ask you to speak for Colm) are different than a lot of the songs that have come out of the North of Ireland, in the last thirty years since the Civil Rights movement. A lot of the songs are partisan; a lot of the songs, even if they are pro-Civil Rights, are very obviously against the British occupation of Northern Ireland or against the status quo. Your songs aren’t quite like that; what do you think is the difference?

TS: Well, I think a lot of people who write the so-called ‘blood and thunder’ songs… well, maybe that’s unfair to call them that because a lot of them are very good songs. But the one-side idea song, most of the people probably don’t live in a mixed area, or they probably don’t know the other sort. From the very beginning, we lived in a mixed area, and even though we didn’t agree with the politics of Unionism, these people who literally lent us a spade and helped us dig the spuds and we helped them… they were very real people with very real fears, as well. My own feeling is that we must learn from each other because we are only half of what we could be. If we only stick to our own point of view, certainly we never would have gotten any crops done if we had stuck to our own point of view, in that sense. Again, that’s symbolic of a much wider thing. Our audience was always people from both sides. If you go in and you sing a song which takes the feet totally from underneath half the audience, they’ll never listen to anything else you’ll ever say, no matter how true it is. So to be true to your own feelings and your own message, if you want to put it that way, I think you must take that into account, the other person’s fears and feelings, because you’re doing them a great disservice and you’re doing your own tradition and your own message a terrible disservice by turning off the very people who need these thoughts and who need these feelings.

The ‘Roses’ song, for example, is a song that I’ve spent an awful long time to make sure that both sides are suffering. I think the Protestants, they have been the bully in many ways, but most of them have been victims as well, in a sense—they have been the victims too. I remember talking to a man one time, in and around the time of power-sharing, an executive in the North that actually fell. He came up to Shankill Road and I said, ‘would you share power?’ And he says, ‘I don’t have any power.’ This man had no job on Shankill Road. These people… we all have the same legacy of poverty. Some of us have been told that we’re better off than the other person, but we’re not, and I don’t want to turn those people off. I would have my own feelings about how a solution should come about, but I think that they must be part of it.

MM: It seems to me, just from listening to you talk then, that the fact that you come from a community where there has been some positive contact between both communities gives you a different perspective than somebody who would have come from west Belfast, or from the bog side, who wouldn’t have had very much positive contact.

TS: Yes, I think so. I think so. Because you know, I was just doing a piece in Paris, I think I mentioned, with this Iraqi painter, called [Neman Saman] who’s an excellent painter and a wonderful human being. He’s doing an exhibition called ‘Without Faces.’ It’s all about the bombing of the most ancient culture of the planet by the US or the UN troops, or bombers. He was saying that it was easy to bomb people if you don’t see their faces. The television showed these shots, almost computer shots, of firing a rocket in some direction, but you’d never, not one picture, of an Iraqi. Never, not one injury, nothing like that… if you keep faces away from it, and if you can keep people from ever knowing each other, you can create war—it’s easy. But if people know each other and see all the positive and good aspects, they will see it in a much better perspective.

MM: Thanks a lot Tommy.

TS: You’re very welcome, Mick.

MM: You went over a lot of topics there, and I think the mystery of songwriting is still there; I think that’s something that some people just seem to have.

TS: I’m sure, Mick, like anything else, it’s not a mystery, and that someone much better versed in it than I would be could explain it much better. I think maybe telling a story and putting it into a rhyme, and picking a chorus… well, you don’t even need a chorus. If you’re playing to audiences, I think a chorus is good. Pick a chorus that sort of sums it up.

MM: I think what’s come out of our talk is the fact that you don’t have to have a knowledge of the formal structure, you don’t have to study something. What you have is an intuitive ability and talent to be able to encapsulate experience in that powerful way that enables you to create a song that will rivet a lot of people. Obviously not everybody has that ability.

TS: No, maybe not… But I think somebody who is already musician and is really good with words, I’d be very surprised if they wouldn’t come up with a song. It’s just maybe the matter of getting into the mood of it.

MM: It’s the same thing in traditional and the instrumental music too. Only a certain number of the musicians, no matter how great they are, will compose the tunes. And of that number, the ones who will compose the tunes, a tiny number, a very tiny number again, will have their tunes played by other people. So we’re never really going to get to the bottom of it all, because it really is mysterious.

TS: I think it is. I think it is dipping into a well, and you’re not too sure what’s going to come out of the well. You know there’s going to be water in it, but the elements in it… and we’re all dipping into the same well, with different buckets and at different times. You’re never quite sure—there might be a frog in the bucket one time. And that’s what you’re looking for!

MM: That’s a good way to end!

Rebekah Brooks: her resignation letter to staff.

At News International we pride ourselves on setting the news agenda for the right reasons. Today we are leading the news for the wrong ones. The reputation of the company we love so much, as well as the press freedoms we value so highly, are all at risk. As chief executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place. I have believed that the right and responsible action has been to lead us through the heat of the crisis. However my desire to remain on the bridge has made me a focal point of the debate.

This is now detracting attention from all our honest endeavours to fix the problems of the past. Therefore I have given Rupert and James Murdoch my resignation. While it has been a subject of discussion, this time my resignation has been accepted. Rupert’s wisdom, kindness and incisive advice has guided me throughout my career and James is an inspirational leader who has shown me great loyalty and friendship.

I would like to thank them both for their support. I have worked here for 22 years and I know it to be part of the finest media company in the world. News International is full of talented, professional and honourable people. I am proud to have been part of the team and lucky to know so many brilliant journalists and media executives.

I leave with the happiest of memories and an abundance of friends. As you can imagine recent times have been tough. I now need to concentrate on correcting the distortions and rebutting the allegations about my record as a journalist, an editor and executive. My resignation makes it possible for me to have the freedom and the time to give my full cooperation to all the current and future inquiries, the police investigations and the CMS appearance. I am so grateful for all the messages of support. I have nothing but overwhelming respect for you and our millions of readers.

I wish every one of you all the best.

Rebekah

No relationship is safe, no loyal bond strong enough for Rupert Murdoch who – looking more than the sum of his 80 years – is mounting a final battle to save the company he built from nothing. His decision to throw Les Hinton to the wolves is his most dramatic move yet. For more than 50 years, as a journalist and then an executive, Hinton loyally served the Murdoch empire from its roots in Australia to the height of its power in New York. Now, in a desperate effort to save News Corporation’s most valuable assets – its 27 US broadcast licences and the 20th Century Fox movie studio – Murdoch is prepared to sacrifice one of his closest allies.

The problem for Murdoch is that every time he ditches a key executive, the flames of scandal flick ever closer to him. Hinton was ditched because he was the crucial link between Murdoch’s valuable US businesses and the tainted operation in Britain. He was at the helm of NI – the holding company for his UK newspapers including the News of the World and the Times – when it seemed that everyone who was in sniffing distance of a significant news story found their phones being hacked.

Questions were being raised about what Hinton knew about corrupt payments to London police officers: if he was shown to have been aware of them, that would be a felony in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The problem for News Corp now is that, at every stage, its attempts to contain this story have failed. The decision to close the News of the World was motivated in part to save the chief executive of NI, Rebekah Brooks: that decision bombed and Brooks resigned on Friday.
But the departure of Brooks was not enough to contain the scandal in Britain, so Hinton, who has been more significant to the company’s fortunes and to Murdoch personally for far longer than Brooks, also left. The inevitable next move for Murdoch is prolicide. His son James, appointed in 2007 as chairman and chief executive of News Corporation’s operations in Europe and Asia, based at News International’s headquarters in Wapping, east London, clings on – but only for now.

In London, James Murdoch oversaw the response to the hacking scandal. He approved the £700,000 hush money paid to Gordon Taylor, the former chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association – a decision he has blamed on poor advice. (The legal director of News International, Tom Crone, was one of the executives of News International to leave this week.)

Meanwhile American political voices were already calling for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to be prosecuted in the US for bribery in the News of the World scandal. Rupert Murdoch donated $1m to a pro-business lobby in the US months before the group launched a high-profile campaign to alter the anti-bribery law – the same law that could potentially be brought to bear against News Corporation over the phone-hacking scandal. News Corporation contributed $1m to the US Chamber of Commerce last summer. In October the chamber put forward a six-point programme for amending the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, a law that punishes US-based companies for engaging in the bribery of foreign officials. Progressive groups in the US have speculated that there is no coincidence in the contemporaneous timing of the Murdoch donation and the launch of the chamber’s FCPA campaign, which they claim is designed to weaken the anti-bribery legislation. “The timing certainly raises questions about who is bankrolling this campaign – if it’s not News Corporation who is it?” said Joshua Dorner of the Centre for American Progress action fund.

Ilyse Hogue of the monitoring group Media Matters said the donation was in tune with Murdoch’s track record. “Time and again we’ve seen News Corporation use their massive power and influence to change laws that don’t suit them. The proximity of this contribution and the chamber’s lobbying campaign at least should raise eyebrows.”

The Chamber of Commerce dismissed the suggestions of a link between its campaign and the News of the World scandal as “preposterous” and “completely false”. “Our efforts to modernise an outdated act have been ongoing for nearly a year,” a spokesman said, adding that the aim of the proposals was to obtain clear rules of the road for American businesses. The FCPA can imprison and fine individuals and companies. It was signed into law in 1977 as a means of clamping down on the bad behaviour of US companies abroad. In recent years it has been increasingly usesd. The 10 heaviest FCPA settlements have all occurred since 2007 and total $2.8bn.

News Corporation, which has its headquarters in the US, emphasises in its corporate literature that it has a global anti-bribery policy. “We don’t offer, give, solicit or accept bribes or kickbacks, either in cash or in the form of any other thing or service of value,” it says.

But evidence has come to light that News Corporation employees working for the News of the World bribed police officers in the UK. “What News of the World did would seem to fall squarely within the parameters of the FCPA,” said Philip Raible, a media lawyer with Rayner Rowe LLP in New York. The chorus of demands that News Corporation face an FCPA investigation has grown steadily louder in the US in the past two days. The former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has called in Slate for an immediate investigation of the company for violation of the anti-bribery act. Congressional representatives have added their voices to demands for an official investigation. Bruce Braley, a Democratic member of the powerful House oversight committee, told CNN that Congress itself should look into whether Murdoch’s company broke anti-bribery laws.

A Republican representative in New York, Peter King, has called on the FBI to look into claims that News of the World was involved in phone-hacking activities in the US. And several members of Congress have written to the US attorney general, Eric Holder, asking him to see whether News Corporation has breached the FCPA.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has the authority to investigate companies under the FCPA, said any civil prosecution it undertook would only be made public if it asked the courts for an injunction prohibiting further violations of the law. No relationship is safe, no loyal bond strong enough for Rupert Murdoch who – looking more than the sum of his 80 years – is mounting a final battle to save the company he built from nothing.

His decision to throw Les Hinton to the wolves is his most dramatic move yet. For more than 50 years, as a journalist and then an executive, Hinton loyally served the Murdoch empire from its roots in Australia to the height of its power in New York. Now, in a desperate effort to save News Corporation’s most valuable assets – its 27 US broadcast licences and the 20th Century Fox movie studio – Murdoch is prepared to sacrifice one of his closest allies.

The problem for Murdoch is that every time he ditches a key executive, the flames of scandal flick ever closer to him.

Hinton was ditched because he was the crucial link between Murdoch’s valuable US businesses and the tainted operation in Britain. He was at the helm of NI – the holding company for his UK newspapers including the News of the World and the Times – when it seemed that everyone who was in sniffing distance of a significant news story found their phones being hacked. Questions were being raised about what Hinton knew about corrupt payments to London police officers: if he was shown to have been aware of them, that would be a felony in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The problem for News Corp now is that, at every stage, its attempts to contain this story have failed. The decision to close the News of the World was motivated in part to save the chief executive of NI, Rebekah Brooks: that decision bombed and Brooks resigned on Friday. But the departure of Brooks was not enough to contain the scandal in Britain, so Hinton, who has been more significant to the company’s fortunes and to Murdoch personally for far longer than Brooks, also left.

The inevitable next move for Murdoch is prolicide. His son James, appointed in 2007 as chairman and chief executive of News Corporation’s operations in Europe and Asia, based at News International’s headquarters in Wapping, east London, clings on – but only for now. In London, James Murdoch oversaw the response to the hacking scandal. He approved the £700,000 hush money paid to Gordon Taylor, the former chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association – a decision he has blamed on poor advice. (The legal director of News International, Tom Crone, was one of the executives of News International to leave this week.)

The departure of Hinton suggests that News Corporation has finally got to grips with the global significance of this story, but the worst is yet to come. The FBI has launched an investigation into accusations that News of the World journalists asked a former New York police officer for the phone records of relatives of 9/11 victims. If that toxic allegation is shown to have been true, one thing is certain: Fox News is finished, along with the rest of News Corporation as we know it.

The emotional supercharge of 9/11 in the US is many times greater than Milly Dowler in the UK – and look what happened here.

Commentators have compared the crisis to Watergate; Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter whose revelations helped depose a US president, says it is evident to him the events of the past week “are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event”.

To coin a famous Murdoch newspaper headline: will the last person to leave News Corporation turn off the lights?

Just arrived from Thailand, my suitcase weighs a ton stuffed as it is with winter clothes. But although it’s totally chilly by comparison with a normal day in Asia, it seems to me it was twice as cold the last time I lived in Aberdeen. Then central heating was something you only saw on the TV or benefited from in schools and corporate headquarters, and I remember the nation was shocked when the price of coal burst through the pound-a-bag barrier! You would wake up in the morning with frost on the inside of your bedroom windows as well as the outside!

And it was often cold enough back then to freeze the balls off the proverbial brass monkey!

With car owners then still relatively few and far between, the most hated word in winter was ‘slush’ and the uncoolest form of fashion was wellies. I’d catch a yellow bus into Aberdeen and freeze half to death en route at a time when Jean Imrie was still thought to be funny and Bothy Nichts was still on the telly. Punk rock had come and gone and nobody even knew Tony Blair existed, as Mental Maggie ruled the roost and telephone and electric bills went routinely into three figures.

No surprise then that when in 1983 I got the offer of a job in China exploring for oil offshore with Holder Drilling and BP leading the charge, I grabbed it and left the Frozen North far behind me. It was September 1983. Winter was looming and another Christmas in the pipeyards of Altens held little appeal, so I agreed to forego the prospect of freezing to death in Tullos for the warmer climes of Southern China.

I remember stepping off the ‘plane in China and thinking I had stepped into a boiler house with the doors on the boilers left open by mistake. The heat hits you, blankets you like an invisible duvet, smothering you in hot, humid air, a cloud of high pressure heat that gets right under your clothes and starts the melting process immediately.

And this was late September. Magic!

Actually, my trip abroad was truly a voyage of discovery because I found out where all the Scottish summers had gone. The Asians had nicked them! It’s actually summer every day over there and stuff like snow and frost are alien concepts. I lived in Hong Kong for a while and one winter when a freak drop in temperatures caused a freak frost at the top of the highest mountain, almost the entire population got in their cars to have a look, at 2 in the morning!

It’s little wonder there are so many of them, as they dinnae have to wait for a warm night to get the leg over.

The next morning, and for the next 26 years I woke up every day with the sun shining and with prevailing ambient temperatures associated only with heat waves back in Scotland – and this at 7 in the morning! Very magic.

It was a seductive situation this sun first thing in the morning, and it kept me in Asia for years. But typically, daft Calvanist Scot that I am, I still managed to return home without a suntan,not being a fan of beaches nor lying about idly in the sun.

It’s not warm here in Alba but the warmth of the community and the joy of rediscovering all my old pals and places and wandering through my past in Scotland helps me forget how cold it really is. And it’s not a vicious cold. More like the arm of a friend around you, someone who has just come in from a frosty night. And his or her touch reminds you that central heating really is one of God’s gifts to we once-heathen, once permanently frozen Scots!

I doubt the words ‘chillblains’ or ‘frostbite’ are even to be found in the various Asian lexicons.

Thank goodness!

These days Scotland is a prosperous, middle class, European ‘miracle’ with everyone owning their own houses and cars and getting abroad on holiday at least once a year – unless they are building an extension or moving up the ladder to a bigger place. Or buying a Jag!

But it’s not all good.

There’s a lot of drugs in Scotland and the rest of the UK now, and with this plague comes a rise in crime associated with junkies getting stuck into the vulnerable to steal the wherewithal to score.

More than 4,000 heroin addicts in Aberdeen alone my drug counselling mate Dave tells me. A city of maybe 230,000.

There were about ten known junkies when I left in 1983.

Not even.

Then there is the influx of East Europeans who have arrived to take all the crap jobs and send their dosh home. But many are here simply to take advantage of the generous UK welfare system.

Fine, and frankly, they are everywhere.

Wherever the masses congregate you can see them and hear the heavy Slavic brogues cutting through the Doric chatter. Mostly this new wave of cheap labour is welcome, but disturbingly, my police sergeant friend claims the crime wave in her northerly division is mostly the result of this influx of displaced continentals.

Hardly a surprise really. From unscrupulous communist dictatorships they come, where life was sordid, basic and cheap and where what values there were, were based on who you knew or what you could screw out of an unyielding, often terrifying and always corrupt communist system. Little wonder they come here devoid of scruples and that many are ruthless in their intent often lacking the gentile sensibilities and refined morals of the advanced societies in which they now find themselves.

Some would rather steal or deal drugs than work. The third world mentality they bring means so many want to get rich quickly, not slowly or eventually, if they believe that particular dream at all. They’re not all Polish of course. There are Africans, Russians and Czeks and Romanians here too, but the chances of having an East European lady or gent serving you in Starbucks or MacDonalds, or dealing you bad dope or heroin is exponentially higher than it was even 10 years ago.

It sucks I know. But I am not letting it get to me. I am celebrating the fact that now I am old enough to enjoy the statuesque, grey glory of my home town, built almost entirely from granite, and a monument to an authentically prosperous past and erected by fine and noble stone masons who once worked the cold hard stone into these wonderful terraces, high streets, elegant squares, hospitals, merchants’ homes and entire neighbourhoods, planned and designed by some of the finest architects of their day, though the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh apparently studiously ignored the shimmering potential for even greater architectural glory!

Aberdeen the city is truly a sight for sore eyes in this age of glass and metal monstrosities, and while I lived here 30 years or more before so innocently embarking on my 30-year sojourn to the Far East, it is only now I see properly what I left behind.

His friends call him T-Bone and you’d call him Captain America if you new half of what he’s done in his rich and colourful life up until now. He’s a rock poet is what he truly is, and if he could play guitar half as good as he can write, he’d be up there with SRV and Jimi What’s-his-name.  The guys dig him and the girls adore him, ’cause he gives up his Mississipi vibe through his big smile and generous nature. Tells it like it is and don’t take no shit – unless you’re a Thai general or a Californian highway patrol officer – and even if trouble do call, he gets around it, over it, under it and up and away. That’s his style. That’s T-Bone style. He’s leavin’ town but we know he’ll be back – Bangkok is a little part of his life – but a chunk of his heart.

Thailand’s prime minister pauses briefly and swallows hard as he addresses the question few of his compatriots dare contemplate: life without King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-reigning monarch.

“I am under no illusion — it will be a very difficult time for all of us,” says Abhisit Vejjajiva, who in December patched together a multiparty coalition government and became troubled Thailand’s fifth prime minister in four years.

American-born King Bhumibol, 81, whom many Thais regard as semi-divine, ascended the lotus throne in 1946, when Harry Truman was in the White House and Josef Stalin ruled the former Soviet Union. He has been the lone stabilizing presence in a land that has been rocked by 15 successful or attempted coups d’etat, 16 different constitutions and 27 changes of prime minister during his reign. The stern-faced monarch with few official powers but much influence has at least twice intervened to halt bloodletting.

Thailand’s need for stability has grown more acute with the emergence of a seemingly unbridgeable, color-coded societal chasm between wealthier city dwellers and those that live in the countryside — warring factions that use symbolic hues to literally wear their allegiances on their sleeves.

On one side: the urban elite, based largely in Bangkok, who have adopted the king’s traditional color of yellow. On the other: the majority rural poor, who pledge equal loyalty to the king yet sport red shirts to show their support for billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, the populist prime minister overthrown in a 2006 coup.

Rival Factions

Street demonstrations organized by the rival factions led to the occupation of Bangkok’s two main airports in November and triggered the cancellation of an April meeting of Asian leaders — events that brought unwelcome publicity to the Land of Smiles. A more orderly mass protest was staged on June 27 and others are planned in the coming months.

Amid the chaos, some investors see opportunity in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy behind Indonesia. As of July 7, Thailand’s stock index had surged 30 percent this year compared with a 0.8 decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. During the same period, overseas investors increased their shareholdings by a net $621.4 million after being net sellers of $4.8 billion in stocks last year.

Publicly traded companies in Thailand are trading at just 11 times estimated 2009 earnings, making them the second- cheapest in Asia after Pakistan. They currently offer a dividend yield that averages 4.7 percent compared with 3 percent for U.S. stocks and as little as 1 percent for Chinese equities, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That makes Thailand a buy, says Marc Faber, who manages $300 million in Asian shares at Hong Kong-based Marc Faber Ltd.

‘Paid to Wait’

“I can get here relatively recession-resistant businesses that are well run with a dividend yield of 6 percent or 7 percent,” says Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, who has been buying shares in Thai banks and food producers this year. “If you buy good businesses, it would be most unusual if you did not make good money in 5 or 10 years. And with these dividends, in Thailand you are paid to wait.”

Investors with that kind of time horizon may need to consider what will happen when Thailand has a new sovereign. Already, concerns about the king’s advanced age and uncertainty over the succession have begun to blunt confidence that the royal prerogative will remain powerful.

Regional Influence

That could trigger Thailand’s biggest crisis since 1932, when the military and civil servants overthrew the absolute monarchy, says Stephen Vickers, Hong Kong-based chief executive officer of FTI International Risk Ltd., which advises investors in Thailand.

“In Thailand, the king is the God-bolt that holds the rotor blades to the helicopter,” Vickers says. “Investors have lived through many coups and it’s easy to become blase, but when the king passes away, it will be significantly more serious than before.”

A smooth royal succession would be welcomed throughout Southeast Asia, a market of 575 million people. Fertile, tropical Thailand, with a population of 67 million, is the world’s biggest exporter of rubber and rice, two mainstays of the regional economy.

Even with an abundance of natural resources and a business- friendly environment, Thailand hasn’t been immune from the global recession. Unemployment will nearly double this year to 2.5 percent from 1.3 percent in 2008, according to the National Economic and Social Development Board. That jobless rate is still low by international standards. Global unemployment may reach 7.4 percent, according to a May 28 forecast by the Geneva- based International Labor Organization.

Stimulus Effect

Thailand’s economy shrank 7.1 percent in the first quarter — the worst contraction since the 1998 Asian financial crisis. Exports plunged 26.5 percent and industrial production 10 percent in May — the seventh such monthly declines in both categories. In June, Standard & Poor’s said it may lower Thailand’s BBB+ credit rating. In April, Fitch Ratings lowered its rating for Thai foreign-currency debt for the first time in more than a decade, cutting it to BBB, the second-lowest investment grade.

Prime Minister Abhisit on May 29 introduced a stimulus package worth 1.4 trillion baht ($41 billion) to spur growth. If the program works, Thailand’s economy may shrink by only 3.5 percent this year, the Finance Ministry forecasts.

Royal Investor

The king’s influence over the economy is personal. He’s the country’s leading investor. Through the monarchy’s asset manager, the Crown Property Bureau, Bhumibol controls property and shares worth about $33 billion, according to Porphant Ouyyanont, a Thai academic who has studied royal finances.

Bhumibol’s investment arm holds controlling stakes in the country’s No. 2 bank by market value, Siam Commercial Bank Pcl, and the largest publicly traded conglomerate, Siam Cement Pcl, and owns shares in hotel companies. The fate of that business empire — along with who controls it — is also tied to the royal succession because the king appoints the CPB director general.

Under the constitution, the king can also choose his own successor. The government has disclosed that the next monarch will be Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, 57, a career soldier. Unlike his popular unmarried sister Princess Sirindhorn, 54, a one-time candidate for the throne who does charitable work, the twice-divorced crown prince has fought off unwelcome publicity about his personal life.

Nine Kings

Whatever the rules, the 227-year-old Chakri dynasty, which has provided Thailand’s last nine kings, has been the one constant in a land of frequent political chaos. Bhumibol’s great-grandfather Mongkut was immortalized in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I. The filmed version of the work, starring Russian-born actor Yul Brynner, isn’t shown in Thailand for being disrespectful of the monarchy.

The Chakri dynasty has a history of murky successions. The seventh king, Prajadhipok, abdicated in 1935 three years after losing his absolute powers in a coup by military officers and top civil servants. The throne was then passed to a 10-year-old nephew, Ananda — Bhumibol’s older brother — who spent most of his reign at school and university in Switzerland and did not live long enough to have a coronation.

In June 1946, Ananda, then 20, was found dead in bed in the Grand Palace in Bangkok with a bullet in his forehead and a Colt pistol beside his body. Three men convicted of the murder were executed in 1955, although some historians describe the death as an unsolved mystery.

Boston-Born Monarch

Next in line was Bhumibol, who was born in Boston while his father, Prince Mahidol, was studying medicine at Harvard University. Like his brother, Bhumibol was schooled in Switzerland and returned there after his 1950 coronation and didn’t officially resettle in Bangkok until the following year, by which time Thailand hadn’t had a resident monarch for 16 years.

Bhumibol rebuilt the royal family’s reputation by traveling throughout the countryside setting up model farms and irrigation projects. The king’s popularity also gave him the power to halt military strongmen in their tracks. In 1973, he threw open the gates of his home, Chitrlada Palace, to provide an escape route for students protesting the military dictatorship after troops had opened fire on them.

In 1992, Thais watched on live television as a military commander who had seized power in a coup and whose soldiers fired on unarmed middle-class protesters prostrated himself before the monarch alongside a rival former general who had led the street protests. After a royal dressing down, the coup leader relinquished power.

Land of Smiles

Thailand, the only Southeast Asian country not to be colonized by the West, supported the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Bordered by Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia, the Land of Smiles prospered economically even in the face of frequent political upheavals.

Financial incentives for new business along with a cheap and skilled labor force helped Thailand establish itself as a world-class manufacturer of products ranging from cars to disk drives, according to Michael Dunne, Shanghai-based Asia Pacific managing director at J.D. Power & Associates, a marketing information services company. “It’s Japan’s industrial backyard — the place they’re most comfortable,” he says.

In 1978, Thailand’s economic growth topped 10 percent for the first time. From 1987 to 1993, its average expansion of 10.1 percent outpaced even that of China.

Currency Crisis

Just as Thailand was in the vanguard of Asian economic growth, it also led the region off a cliff in the late 1990s. “Thailand had gone deeply into debt, had invested in many projects that were clearly inappropriate and had allowed speculative markets in stocks and property to run riot,” according to a 2007 United Nations Development Program report.

In July 1997, Thailand could no longer keep its currency, the baht, pegged at 25 to the U.S. dollar. Within six months, the baht halved in value and half of the loans held by Thai banks defaulted. Hundreds of companies collapsed.

Within weeks, the currency contagion had spread through most of Asia. “Thailand was at the forefront of the East Asian miracle and was then pivotal in bringing things to an end,” says Uwe von Parpart, Hong Kong-based chief Asian economist at Cantor Fitzgerald Capital Markets Ltd. “It has been at the forefront of the good and the bad.”

Vacation Paradise

Thailand, with its golden temples and ancient history, also ranks high as a tourist attraction. Its diversions, ranging from grand hotels near coral reefs to raunchy pole-dancing bars, attracted 14.6 million visitors and $27.4 billion in revenue last year, according to the government. As street violence blunts Thailand’s reputation as a vacation paradise, visitor arrivals are expected to fall to 10 million people this year.

The country has expanded its manufacturing capacity, as carmakers including Toyota Motor Corp., Isuzu Motors Ltd., Honda Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. produced 1.4 million vehicles valued at $20 billion in Thailand last year and exported vehicles to 130 countries, according to J.D. Power.

Even amid the prosperity, the gap between rich and poor has continued to grow. While many Bangkok-based investors grew prosperous from the boom years, farmers missed out. Average household income in the capital was 35,000 baht a month in 2007, according to the National Statistic Office. In the northeast, monthly household income was the equivalent of about $340 and some 13 percent of the population lives on less than $1.35 a day — the official poverty line.

Color-Coded Conflict

That divide has transformed the country’s political life into a color-coded conflict. The Yellow Shirts are largely based in Bangkok, a city of 9 million people whose streets are jammed with traffic as Mercedes-Benz sedans vie for space alongside emission-spewing tuk-tuk motorized rickshaws and the occasional elephant.

Opposing them are the Red Shirts, largely rural poor hailing from the impoverished northeast. They back Thaksin, 59, a billionaire businessman who was ousted three years ago for what the military claimed was corruption. Red Shirt leaders play down the revolutionary significance of their chosen color, with one advocate, Veera Musikapong, telling reporters it simply looked better against dark skin.

In the past four elections from 2001 to 2007, voters have returned pro-Thaksin governments. On the past three occasions, the elected governments have been removed from office by a combination of street protests, military pressure and censure in the courts.

Rural Relief

In 1998, Thaksin, a former police officer turned telecommunications tycoon, established his own political party, Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais). Three years later, the party swept to power by winning 248 of 500 parliamentary seats.

The first Thaksin government gave microcredit grants to villages to start businesses and introduced a low-cost health care program — crucial support in a country where 1.4 percent of the population are HIV positive, according to 2008 UN estimates. At the same time, he sent police squads after drug traffickers. Some 2,500 people died in the enforcement effort, not all of them involved in drugs, an operation condemned by Amnesty International for its brutality.

In 2005, Thaksin was re-elected with an even bigger parliamentary tally of 377 seats. That same year, Yellow Shirt leader Sondhi Limthongkul, a former Thaksin supporter, began a campaign of street protests against the prime minister, saying that Thaksin used his office to advance his business interests.

Election Boycott

In January 2006, Thaksin’s family sold its controlling stake in publicly listed Shin Corp. to Temasek Holdings Pte., an investment arm of the Singapore government, for the equivalent of $2.15 billion, in a deal structured so that the Shinawatras paid no tax. That arrangement inspired Yellow Shirt demonstrations in Bangkok led by television station owner Sondhi. Thaksin dismissed the protest, saying Sondhi’s real motivation was vengeance for being denied a broadcast license.

Thaksin responded by calling a snap general election, which the three main opposition parties boycotted. After Thaksin’s inevitable victory, the king made his most significant intervention in politics since the 1992 bloodbath. He gave a speech in April 2006 calling the election undemocratic because of the absence of serious opposition. Two weeks later, the courts annulled the election, and Thaksin remained as head of a caretaker administration pending a new poll.

Before voting could take place, the military staged its coup on Sept. 19, 2006, while Thaksin was in New York attending a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

People Power

In December 2007, the military-backed government held new elections, which a pro-Thaksin party named People Power won. In February 2008, Thaksin returned to Thailand. He fled the country six months later to avoid corruption charges, saying he wouldn’t get a fair trial. In October 2008, he was sentenced to two years in jail in absentia for helping his wife buy government land while he was in office.

People Power’s first prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, 74, was removed from power after nine months by the courts for taking money — the equivalent of just $2,345 — to host a television cooking show. The party then chose Thaksin’s brother- in-law Somchai Wongsawat, 61, as prime minister in a parliamentary vote.

In November 2008, rampaging Yellow Shirts, who claimed Thaksin bought the votes of ignorant farmers, invaded and succeeded in shutting down Bangkok’s two main airports, stranding 400,000 travelers for a week and costing the country $8 billion in lost tourism and airline revenues, according to the Bank of Thailand.

Airport Protest

A week later, the courts dissolved the government for alleged vote buying in a suit brought at the recommendation of Thailand’s Election Commission after one of the government’s senior politicians was found guilty of committing election fraud. The airport protest then ended.

In July, charges were filed against leaders of the yellow shirt airport protests, which include breach of aviation law and illegal assembly, Thai newspapers reported. Among those facing charges is Thailand’s foreign minister, Kasit Piromya, who reported to police on July 6 to hear the charges, Foreign Ministry spokesman Thani Thongphakdi confirmed to Bloomberg News. Kasit earlier this year told reporters in Bangkok that he had done nothing wrong. The ministry spokesman said Kasit, who addressed the crowds from a stage at the airport during the protests, would keep his ministerial position.

‘Bonsai Democracy’

“Thailand has a bonsai democracy,” says Jaran Ditapichai, a Red Shirt leader. “Whenever it grows up, someone cuts it back.”

In April, the Red Shirts agitated for a new election by gate-crashing a summit meeting of Asian leaders in the Thai coastal resort of Pattaya. The siege forced some of the region’s most powerful figures, including Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, to flee by helicopter.

Meanwhile, the exiled Thaksin was broadcasting speeches his opponents interpreted as calls for a republic. In messages played at mass rallies, he used the phrase “patiwat prachochoen,” which roughly translates to “people’s coup.” Nevertheless, Thaksin — whose exact whereabouts are often unknown — has been careful to pledge loyalty to the king.

His words resonate among the 80,000 inhabitants of Bangkok’s Klong Toey shantytown, says Prateep Unsongtham Hata, a 5-foot-tall (152-centimeter-tall) activist known throughout Thailand as the “angel of the slums.” Born in Klong Toey, as a teenager she organized slum dwellers to fight the bulldozing of their homes and was a leader of the 1992 pro-democracy protest that was fired on by the army before the king intervened.

‘No Hope’

“In the past, people had no hope,” Prateep, 57, says. “Then, when Thaksin came in, they could see tangible democracy. They could be healthier, have more food and better job opportunities. But now they find democracy has two classes.”

Thailand, which is 95 percent Buddhist, is already beset by another security problem — a secessionist Muslim insurgency in three southern provinces near the Malaysian border that has claimed more than 3,400 lives since 2004. In June, Abhisit said Thailand may allow more local autonomy and consider Shariah law to defuse the insurgency, which has recently targeted teachers, Muslim worshippers and policemen.

By comparison, the toll in the yellow-red confrontation has been small. Last year, at least seven people died and hundreds were injured in street battles, grenade attacks and shootings related to the protests. In April, Yellow Shirt leader Sondhi escaped death when gunmen sprayed his car with more than 50 bullets. Red Shirt leaders claim that at least 10 of their people were killed during protests the same month.

Health Speculation

The king has remained above the political fray in recent years and his nonattendance at several key ceremonies has triggered speculation in the international press about his health. On Dec. 5, Bhumibol failed to deliver his customary birthday address to the nation for the first time. The king, now bent with age, appeared on television in June presiding over a Buddhist ceremony marking the anniversary of his brother’s death and was also seen receiving an award in government pictures dated June 24.

The task of maintaining stability is in the hands of 44- year-old Prime Minister Abhisit, a leader whose resume mirrors that of a U.K. politician. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to parents who were medical professors, Abhisit attended Eton College, the alma mater of 18 British prime ministers, before earning a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford.

Rising Star

Returning to Thailand in 1986, he lectured at Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy before being elected to Thailand’s parliament in 1992 as a member of the country’s oldest party, the center-right Democrats.

Abhisit joined others in his party pledging to strengthen Thailand’s U.K.-style parliamentary system. In 1997, when the Democrats formed a coalition and introduced a new constitution that gave more powers to the parliament, Abhisit won a cabinet position advising then Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai.

In 2005, four years after the Democrats lost power to Thaksin’s party, Abhisit became opposition leader. His coalition now controls 280 of 480 seats, though the pro-Thaksin opposition, now known as Puea Thai, is the largest single party.

To calm Thai politics, Abhisit has introduced a program for political reconciliation, which includes an election-free period to avoid poll-induced violence, possible amnesty for banned politicians and the promise of new elections after the constitution is changed.

Political Stability

“The question is: Will the government be able to guarantee both the succession and political stability?” Cantor Fitzgerald’s von Parpart says. “That’s going to be a lot easier under circumstances of economic normality rather than economic crisis.”

Stability would also be welcome news for entrepreneurs such as Bill Heinecke, American-born founder of Minor International Pcl, a hotel and restaurant chain that has attracted investment from the king, who, together with the CPB, owns about 4 percent of shares.

The son of a Voice of America correspondent, Heinecke arrived in Bangkok as a teenager in the 1960s. Today his business runs 27 hotels, including Four Seasons and Marriott properties and the luxury Anantara resort chain.

At the height of the airport demonstrations in December, occupancy at the Bangkok Marriott plunged to 20 percent from 80 percent; it bounced back to 65 percent in the first quarter of this year. Minor’s share price, which soared more than 700 percent between 1998 and 2008, has fallen 1 percent this year, trading at 7.8 baht on July 7.

‘Back to Business’

To shore up overseas-investor confidence, Abhisit made a one-day visit to Hong Kong on May 15 and followed that up with visits to Singapore and Beijing in June.

“Thailand continues to get back to business,” he said at a press conference in Hong Kong. Abhisit said the king is still performing his duties. “I can tell you His Majesty is very well aware of all the issues that are pertinent to the current situation.”

In an interview at his Italianate office in Government House in Bangkok five days later, Abhisit discloses that Bhumibol, who has 4 children and 11 surviving grandchildren, has already endorsed his only son as the next king.

“The crown prince is the designated heir,” Abhisit says.

A visit to investor Faber’s home 700 kilometers (435 miles) north of Bangkok highlights both Thailand’s allure and its risks for future investors.

Walled City

Swiss-born Faber first visited Thailand 36 years ago and moved his home there in 2000. Today, he lives in baronial splendor, surrounded by first editions of books such as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, in a teak house on the banks of the Ping River just outside the 1,000-year-old walled city of Chiang Mai.

As night descends on the ancient city’s golden temples, Faber decides it’s time for a beer and leaps astride a blue 1,150-cc Kawasaki motorcycle, arriving a few minutes later outside a neon-lit strip of tiny bars, where friendly girls from the poverty-stricken northeast become friendlier still for the price of an 80 baht “lady’s drink.”

Even at 8 p.m. on a Saturday, the bar girls far outnumber customers at Bar Linda, Faber’s favored watering hole. “A few months ago, this place would have been packed by now,” he says, gesturing down the row of near-empty bars.

Just up the road, a 10-meter-high (33-foot-high) illuminated portrait of the monarch gazes benignly upon the city. “Long Live the King,” the sign proclaims. That’s a sentiment investors, as well as Thais, endorse, even as they also quietly accept that the Land of Smiles will one day shed tears over the end of the Bhumibol era.

Inside THAI Society

By: BOONRAK BOONYAKETMALA

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejajiva’s critique of the “danger” of mixing fact and opinion together in the form of “news” by the so-called “television news chatterers” is evidently being completely ignored, not only by the numerous practitioners but also by professional associations theoretically enforcing ethical standards upon such people, and the consumers themselves.

Someone’s watching: While we all blindly consume, Uajit Wirotetrairat keeps an eye on the mass media.

Her company, Media Monitor, has produced much research regarding Thai television over these past three years. In the meantime, facts and opinions continue to be gleefully synchronised in a variety of formulas on our television screens day in and day out, as if this was the reality of our age.

What are the central repercussions of such a phenomenon on our television journalism and our social understanding?

Do we have to live with the anarchy imposed upon us by the mushrooming TV news chatterers for the unforeseeable future?

First of all, it should be noted from the outset that our good prime minister did not elaborate on what he refers to as the “danger,” assuming perhaps that it was a self-evident statement. Far from it. Since no relevant authorities, including the many schools of journalism in our “universities”, have voiced any meaningful reaction to the amazingly short-lived controversy, this may imply that very few people actually understand why facts and opinions should be properly separated in TV journalism.

After all, it is fun to mix them. Who would want to hear only the dry facts?

True, an ongoing trend anywhere in the world is for “reportage,” a blend of fact and opinion in journalism, a quiet but steady upsurge explainable by the self-serving expansion of the media, which has practically become the sole authority for our “daily truth”.

The conscious blurring of fact and opinion represents an intentional overtaking of power on the part of the media to define what is true and false, and, therefore, right and wrong. Watching TV reporting is consequently an end in itself, and the reporter now poses as a god who knows everything.

Actually, many TV journalists do not know that much. For example, very few such people have written anything that requires any serious learning. So, what could be the legitimate intellectual basis for their instant “judgement” on the meaning(s) of a particular piece of news, often rooted in a series of complicated social processes? What if their interpretation of the news is shallow, simplistic, misleading, and anti-democratic?

Who could hold them responsible for what they do?

Isn’t the search for meaning a field more properly cut out for the other members of learned society who are more qualified to make deeper judgements about the facts, however seemingly unimportant as they surface in the news?

With self-appointed gods posing as TV anchormen, there is thus no need for news consumers to think for themselves any more, much less to explore the true implications of accepting the opinionated “facts” at their expense. In this way, the future of participatory democracy is thrown into a black hole.

Once the TV news chatterers are allowed to “judge” the meaning of news for the audience, there is little space left for alternative interpretation. Without room for independent thinking on TV, democracy might not work any more.

Worse, once TV news chatterers mix fact with opinion so casually, this seems to eliminate the need for any meaningful opinion forums on TV. Consequently, our TV news industry is monopolised by a few dozen playful reporters posing as celebrities, casually telling you how to think about the news every day.

For this reason, there is little left to be analysed by anyone else.

Without serious opinion forums on TV involving the best minds among us – such as the public intellectuals, top university researchers, independent thinkers, local philosophers and other worthwhile voices – audiences are unfortunately deprived of any opportunity to learn from the truly learned.

Consequently, our TV is dominated by the mediocre, average views heard over and over again, without any potential to ignite new thinking and approach to public issues and policies.

That television is predestined, under capitalism, for the unthinking masses is probably too true for television’s own good. If the TV industry does not believe in the ability of its audience to think, it does not have to think itself.

This statement, scary as it is, may actually account for much of the monolithic, predictable views we hear on TV every day, not to mention the tired programme formats forced upon us by the industry’s producers whose origins trace back to only a few dominant groups, with a very small space left for the new, emerging production forces, whose creativity might be just what the industry needs to revitalise itself.

Note that our TV industry is crippled in its potential to contribute new ideas to resolve any major problems that have arisen in our society.

The noticeably few opinion forums that are in existence are operated by those who are seemingly unaware of the scope and implications of the issues under discussion.

The guests who are invited to speak on such programmes are arguably too few, thoughtlessly selected, and sometimes intellectually unqualified to say anything on the topic in question.

Historically, serious opinion forums are few and short-lived on our free TV. For this reason, TV has failed miserably to contribute meaningfully to the search for solutions for the most pressing questions of our time.

For instance, there has never been a fruitful discussion of the problematic lese majestic laws, which could be quite instructive about some of the root conflicts in our society. With the discussion on political reform, when and if they are discussed on TV, the views presented are limited in terms of sources and vision.

Naturally, many key issues facing our society are never meaningfully discussed on TV. For example, the dire need for quality political leadership in our society is never treated on television. What kind of dynamics do we have to put in place so that good and effective political leaders can naturally emerge on the scene?

Without the right mould for breeding political leaders, Thailand’s chance in the constantly changing global system is near zero. As a matter of fact, one very powerful way of explaining our current crisis is precisely the absence of an effective system from which charismatic leaders can surface continuously.

There are, of course, many other issues on the wish-list that we would hope to learn from television. The declining quality of our university system, not to mention the rapid irrelevance of such an education, has not been sufficiently examined on TV. The steady deterioration in the competitiveness of our export-oriented industries is also another topic which requires serious attention from TV for obvious reasons.

The sad neglect of our agricultural sector and its consequences on our economy and politics, is also in need of explanation.

Likewise, the bottomless decay of cultural values, demonstrated in the widespread premature, promiscuous sex, violence, and irrational consumerism among our youth, is another subject that demands a full understanding through television.

Given their relevance, if and when such sample issues are adequately discussed on TV by those in the know, the educational value and policy implications of such programmes will be immense.

Needless to say, the reporting on TV is more destructive than we may have been led to think. Prime Minister Abhisit might agree that with a more disciplined TV news industry, wherein facts and opinions are properly separated, more valuable news-oriented programming possibilities will emerge.

Without TV news presenters playing god, the audience will have to think for themselves about the meaning of the news.

Ultimately, such a process is conducive to the development of a democratic citizenship. Under such circumstances, top-class opinion programmes that are truly educational could mushroom on TV.

The fresh competitiveness in such programmes would one day lead to genuine quality a’ la the BBC’s Hard Talk, paving the way for those who are really in the know to make their debut on TV – a phenomenon that would be welcomed by all.

(c) Dr Boonrak Boonyaketmala. Dr Boonrak is Associate Professor at Thammasat University and author of many books on media, culture and society.

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