Four guys who look like they could come off of a sales brochure for a Miami Beach retirement community were arrested in Pattaya today For Unlawful Carnal Knowledging young girls. Long prison sentences seem probable though pointless, given these geezers' proximity to oblivion.An interesting note: I have my news trawler set to "Pattaya", and if any news source in the world writes about Pattaya, I'll know about it.
So, who covered this story?
The Washington Post. BBC News. Reuters. The San Diego Tribune. The Scotsman. The only news sources from non-English speaking countries [insert Scottish joke here] which covered this story was "SwissInfo" from Switzerland and a Romanian site that had the story as well, but they were just running the Reuters automated news feed, and — once again — the story was only in English.
Another thing of note was that almost every article had to add in some sort of throwaway sentence describing Pattaya's "notorious" reputation. (I would link to the Bangkok Post article, which was particularly damning of Pattaya, but their website sucks, and no link shall remain unbroken there.)
No wonder there are no more English-speaking tourists in Pattaya... but still hundreds of thousands of tourists from everywhere else. (Well, of course that's not quite true: We still have lots of English-speaking tourists, but for these particular folks, it is specifically because of the raffish and ribald news stories about Pattaya that they come to visit.)
2 comments:
If guilt is proven I would personally throw away the key anyway, regardless of their age.
They should also introduce a new "crime" of laughing at the camera when confronting a VERY serious issue - god that picture p****s me off!
Good point, PN.
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