They are determined by the stimulus of a seemingly unrelated institution, the police. So rather than tell a story about freedom per se, this history traces the relationship between the police and the form of the news. The two are interlinked, with the latter's shift to tablodism stemming in part from its intimate relationship with the former. When seen throgh the lens of crime news, the history of the press reads less clearly as a tragedy about the demise of the public sphere than as thriller complete with bad cops and noble villains; the newspaper in Thailand is a medium of communication that has emerged from sometimes violent episodes of a larger struggle over the generation and control of information, explaining in part why murder and violence fill its pages today.