The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand (FCCT) is marking World Press Freedom Day this year with a livestreamed joint panel presentation with UNESCO. It will highlight how the current state of freedom of expression affects the work of journalists and the broader human rights situation in Thailand.

While there has certainly been erosion of civic space in Thailand since the coup of 2014, and draconian libel laws remain in place that criminalize alleged offenders – the law of lese-majeste being the most abused and egregious -- the situation in other parts of mainland Southeast Asia is much more alarming. 

News organizations have been shut down in Myanmar, with journalists brutally detained and even killed; others have gone into hiding or fled the country. Laos has no free press, and receives almost no international media scrutiny. The Cambodian government has put a once lively and informative press out of business, thereby promoting one of the most unaccountable states on Earth. Vietnam also has no free press, and routinely imprisons bloggers who raise environmental flags that are clearly in the public interest. 

This dismal media environment is aggravated by the damage done to so-called legacy media by social media advances. The ubiquitous internet has disrupted traditional business models and revenue streams. Journalists find it increasingly hard to subsist, and are often kept in check by editors cowed by their owners. Many promising young journalists have moved to more remunerative careers. 

The situation is made worse by the tsunami of misinformation, fake news and complete nonsense pedalled on the internet by irresponsible or malicious users. This problem will only be aggravated by increasingly sophisticated generative artificial intelligence capable of spewing out reams of credibly presented but completely unverified material with the potential to perpetuate inaccuracies and deepen societal fissures.  

We may be teetering on the edge of an information black hole – a world without the accurate, checked information all good news organizations should aim to produce, and which everybody should be able to access. 

Governments need to realise that societies in which wrong and corrosive information circulates freely are likely to become dangerously unstable. When nobody knows what is actually going on, decisions at all levels are compromised.  

The public meanwhile needs to recommit to finding ways of supporting good journalism -- and that might mean actually funding it. Newspapers may be going out of fashion, but paying for tested, reliable news streams should not. 

The Fourth Estate must also take stock of its shortcomings and do better, because a world without a viable press cannot expect to be free.