HISTORIES oF THE press in Thailand typically begin with an account of how in 1844 Dr. Dan Beach Bradley, an American Protestant missionary from New York, pub-G lished the kingdom's first newspaper, the Bangkok Recorder They then go on to tell a tale about how the explosion, albeit in relative terms of printed' matter in the third and Sgnm decade of the twentieth cen ed the demo revo the fistshite momichy The story then turns quickly into a tale of how a series of subsequent military governments all worked to wring the life out of the vibrant, if some- what unruly, industry It is against this backdrop of endangered liberty that people have come to understand the press in Thailand (and indeed in many other societies). This history of the press begins instead with a murder, that of Ari Liwira, publisher of Thailand's most widely circulated daily paper in the early 1950s, and ends with the rev- elation that what newspapers look like and the content they report not only reflect current social conditions and the financial imperatives ofthe marketplace, they are deter mined by the stimulus of a seemingly unrelated institution, the police. So rather than tell 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 tabloidism Lim its intimate relationship history of the press reads than as a thriller complete medium of communication larger struggle over murder and violence