We’ll Fight Them On The Beach

Forget Dogma - the movie that's really stirring up a hornet's nest at the moment is Leonardo di Caprio's upcoming flick The Beach. As the trial in Thailand opens with the film's producers accused of environmental damage to Maya Bay - one of their Thai locations - something of a war has begun between the old and new media in Thailand. The battle kicked off this week with The Nation - one of Thailand's biggest newspapers - running a two day editorial casting aspersions on the independence of a website based on The Beach. ThaiStudents.com has always purported to be a website run by a bunch of schoolkids. When di Caprio was filming in Thailand, such was the site's authority that the world's media looked to it to provide information on filming dates and locations. The Nation argued that instead of being run by a bunch of talented amateurs, the site was instead controlled by a 'team of public relations experts, who are carefully monitoring and analysing news worldwide, contacting individuals and agencies to make statements, producing articles and commentaries and moderating discussions on the various web site message boards'. It went on to accuse the site of deliberately misleading its users on the issue of the alleged environmental damage. 'It's truly flattering.' says Richard Barrow - the English teacher who heads up the computer department at Sriwittayapaknam School, just south of Bangkok, which runs the site. 'But we utterly reject these allegations. The website and these boards started as a small school project which has snowballed... However, we should point out that no-one is pretending to be experts. This is not a pro-Fox board nor do we delete any anti-The Beach comments.'