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Published on January 17, 2008

The court order will be faxed to relevant agencies at 1pm. TITV has been off air since Tuesday, to allow for the establishment of Thai Public Broadcasting Service (TPBS), which is set to take over the assets and frequency of TITV. TPBS will operate the country's first public television station.

Following the abrupt closure of TITV, hundreds of its employees lodged a complaint with the Administrative Court demanding an injunction against the order to close down TITV. They described the order by the Public Relations Department as illegitimate.

In a related development, TPBS yesterday began accepting applications from those interested in working with the country's first public television station. On the first day, 236 applicants expressed interest. None was a TITV employee.

But TITV employees based in the North, the Northeast and the South yesterday said they planned to apply for jobs at TPBS.

The application period ends on Saturday.

TPBS acting director is Thepchai Yong, who resigned as group editor of Nation Multimedia Group (NMG) and sold all his shares in the group earlier this week.

To avoid suggestions of conflict of interest following the appointment of Thepchai to the TPBS temporary policy board, Nation Broad-casting Corporation will not seek airtime on Thai Public Broadcast-ing Service during its transitional period.

Nation Broadcasting Corpora-tion is a part of the group, which also publishes The Nation and operates Nation Channel.

"To prevent any question of conflict of interest, we will not propose any programmes to TPBS during its transitional period," the corporation's president Adisak Lim-prungpatanakij said yesterday.

However, he said Nation Broad-casting would continue to supply quality content for other television stations as it had over the past 17 years. On Tuesday, the Cabinet ap-pointed a temporary policy board for TPBS. The five-member board will remain in charge for no more than 180 days.

The board announced the service would go on air on February 1.

Thepchai said the service would select content providers transparently and fairly based on proposed programme quality and their ability to fulfil the public television's objectives. He said all providers, including NMG, could tender proposals.

Adisak said Nation Broadcasting supported the establishment of the public service.

"We will also investigate if there is any interference from the government or business-interest groups in forming and running the public service," he said.

The Nation