Pattaya Bashing: new sport for the new millennium

Editor;

The year 2000 has seen the growth of a new ‘sport’ in the international media: Pattaya bashing. The ‘sport’ has been around for almost as long as Pattaya itself, but this year it seems to have gained a new impetus.

It kicked off back in March with an article in the American soft-porn magazine Maxim that had a front page exclaiming: ‘Naked by Noon, Dead by Dawn, Life in the world’s most dangerous resort’. Pullouts like, ‘Pattaya is a human roach motel, they check in but they don’t check out’ must have had readers of this drivel living here in Pattaya almost choking on their bowls of Cornflakes with laughter.

The problem is that most of the (overseas) readers of this trash tend to believe what is written. The fact is that the reporter concerned, according to those in the know, spent most of his time engaging in carnal pursuits and imbibing copious quantities of cheap booze at the expense of his employer and then had the temerity to lambaste the resort. When it comes to hypocrisy it seems members of the Fourth Estate have contrived to obtain a monopoly when it comes to reporting on Pattaya.

The fact is that most of us know Pattaya is probably one of the safest places in the world in which to live, but of course that doesn’t help to sell magazines.

Then Australian Penthouse, a hardcore porn magazine, went in to bat with an equally ridiculous waste of precious trees and natural resources. The first paragraph of their article contained this classic: ‘As the popular T-shirt, straining around the gut of so many tourists says: “Welcome to Pattaya, the Disneyland for Grown-ups”....’ The sad part is that no one I know has ever seen a copy of this fabled T-shirt. It just doesn’t exist, or if it does, then it certainly isn’t ‘popular’.

It was the Australian Penthouse article that spurred the 60 Minutes Australia programme into action with the aim of doing a piece on Pattaya. More of that later.

The British also got in on the act with a couple of programmes by the BBC and others. Must have been a slow period in Britain for the usual ‘vicar elopes with lorry-driver’ and ‘naked MP in bed with choir boy’ stories.

One of the interesting features with these features is how they concentrate on a place far enough away, yet sufficiently recognisable, so that the average reader cannot discern fact from fiction. They also contain the essential elements of paid for sex, repulsive foreign nationals engaging in activities that, they consider, went out with the end of the British Raj, and impoverished local women whose only way out from under is to endure the attentions of men they don’t like.

However, hypocrisy reached new heights and journalistic integrity new lows with the airing of the Australian 60 Minutes programme on Pattaya.

The producer spent nearly eight days in Bangkok and Pattaya preparing the background to the programme and then, for the final five days, was joined by the cameraman, soundman and reporter, Jeff McMullen.

The resultant programme was headed, ‘The Ugly Australians’ and was a masterpiece of creative editing and sensationalist scripting. Turn the voiceover down and what comes shining through, despite the editing, is the ‘sanuk’ nature of Fun Town. Turn the voiceover up and the lurid reporting for which 60 Minutes has become infamous is readily in evidence.

Yes, but there is a Buddha. Eight days after the programme went to air, reporter Jeff McMullen was sacked after 16 years on the front lines.

McMullen’s Machiavellian nature was revealed within a day or two of his removal from the 60 Minutes line up. He went into damage control regarding his reputation. He lambasted the Channel Nine network and 60 Minutes for its use of chequebook journalism, the obsession with ratings as the arbiter of the value of a given story, tabloidism and sensationalism.

Yet, this is the same man who arrived in Pattaya and told one of his three ‘victims’ that the programme was searching for nothing less noble than, in his words, “the truth”. But the truth from what standpoint: clearly, a truth based around sensationalism, tabloidism and an obsession with ratings.

Where will it end? Despite mankind’s advances in almost every field of human endeavour, the Judaeo-Christian attitudes to sex still seem to be stuck in a time warp reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials, Puritanism and a WASP-ish mentality that equates sexual satisfaction and enjoyment with the machinations of Lucifer and the forces of Darkness.

Why is it that I just can’t help thinking that there is an element of jealousy about much of the reporting on Pattaya and Thailand? The mendacious hacks seem to possess a flagellant urge that would have propelled them towards canonisation in the world that was once dominated by the Holy Inquisition. Sadly, their petty jealousies combine with their pious tones to produce a fodder that is consumed whole and unquestioned by a general public grown complacent and pliable by a constant stream of media sound bites thinly disguised as fact. Average people grow fat with self-satisfaction as they feast on a rote diet replete with the fruits of xenophobia, racism and condescension.

Perhaps the attitudes expressed by the minions who venture into Pattaya say more about the sexual dysfunction of themselves and the publishers and producers who lap it up with such religious fervour than the people they report on.

Duncan