Alerted by thaienews, I found Seth Mydans reporting on Chiranuch under the bootheel of the Thai state at the NYTimes. The NYTimes style sheet requires that the meat of any article, the real opinion of the NYTimes editorial board, be published at the end :

Fighting for Press Freedom in Thailand

“Press freedom, some might say, is heading down farther and we don’t yet see how deep it will sink,” said Ubonrat Siriyuwasak, a scholar of the media who is retired from the faculty of communications at Chulalongkorn University.

“At first glance it looks to a lot of people as if there is still freedom of the press,” she said. “But if we take a closer look, we have to conclude that this is a serious situation because opposition opinion has been in a sense wiped out or must go underground.”

In a recent commentary, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University, described Ms. Chiranuch’s troubles as part of a “‘soft’ civil-military authoritarianism,” nuanced and disguised for acceptance in an increasingly globalized world.

He said her case “epitomizes a plethora of other cases that have found little voice because of the climate of fear, intimidation and coercion attendant with civil-military hybrid repression.”

When her cases come to court, Ms. Chiranuch said she is determined to plead not guilty, although this could mean a longer sentence if she is convicted.

Asked if she had been tempted to move into a less precarious line of work, she said, “I couldn’t find another thing that is as interesting as what I do now.”

And in any case, she said, “Even if I quit, the threat would not stop. The process continues.”