After weeks of rumours, it was not soldiers in the streets that signalled to Thais that a coup was finally under way. The uniform playing of royalist songs over all the country's TV and radio networks is what had the people sending text messages to each other and logging on to MSN.

Even when CNN broke images of tanks rolling into Bangkok, without official confirmation CNN could only speculate as to what was probable. But it was the sudden interruption of those images and the blacking out of all news channels on cable that gave Thailand the real news.

Thais have seen coups before, and they've learned to read the signs. The media, in particular, has always been a reliable indicator of change in the air.

The very relationship that Thaksin had with the Thai press - one of the freest and most vibrant in Asia - had been held as the most concrete proof that the man was an enemy of democracy.

Thaksin was portrayed as greedy and power-hungry, as evidenced by designs to install a one-party system alongside private investments that tended to monopolise every industry they touched. But as to the charge that he was a tyrant, what stuck was his heavy-handed dealings with journalists.