Saudi’s financial hold on regional media helped in stemming outcry
FROM the time Saudi writer and dissident Jamal Khashoggi vanished into the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on Oct 2, newspapers and television stations across the region allied with Riyadh have echoed the Saudi denial of any knowledge of his fate.
Or they weaved alternative scenarios of an alleged plot by Saudi Arabia’s top rivals Qatar and Turkey to destabilise the kingdom.
After more than two weeks of international pressure, the kingdom finally acknowledged Khashoggi’s death inside the consulate, claiming he was killed by accident in an interrogation gone awry, and promised to punish those responsible.
The loyal media immediately switched gears to praise the kingdom’s sense of justice and the decisiveness of its monarch King Salman. Some even commended the kingdom for its transparency.
Saudi Arabia’s financial clout among the Arab media has clearly given it an influential tool as it grapples with the international outcry over Khashoggi’s death.
“Simply put, our (Arab) media are financed by regimes that commit a crime every day that is no less gruesome than the one committed against Jamal Khashoggi,” read an editorial last Sunday in Daraj, an independent online news site.
“What happened should offer us an opportunity to consider just how much we need an independent media.”
The media’s treatment of the affair reflected decades of checkbook diplomacy adopted by the oilrich Saudis to secure allies and silence criticism of their policies.
The kingdom has spent millions of dollars over the years to influence newspapers and television stations from Morocco to Iraq.
Sometimes it has invested in media outlets, but more often it has provided funds to help them stay afloat. It has also provided perks and cash directly to individual writers and television personalities.
The inner workings of that policy were laid bare in 2015 when WikiLeaks published thousands of cable exchanges between Saudi diplomatic missions and the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh.
The exchanges revealed the extent of Saudi spending on news outlets and journalists across the Arab world and how keen many of them were to secure Saudi funding, often under the pretext of countering smear campaigns targeting the kingdom.
The kingdom itself has powerful mouthpieces of its own. The newspaper Asharq al-Awsat and the 24-hour television news channel Al-Arabiya have a wide reach across the Arab world. Both are owned by Saudis close to the royal family.
Abdul-Rahman al-Rashed, a onetime editor of Asharq al-Awsat and head of al-Arabiya, acknowledged in an unusually candid op-ed this week that Saudi money is one of Riyadh’s most effective foreign policy assets in the Arab world.
He called criticism of the kingdom over the Khashoggi affair “media aggression” and pointed out that the kingdom bankrolled many of the region’s states and institutions.
“In a nutshell, weakening Saudi Arabia will broaden the region’s circles of unrest and failures,” he wrote.
The embrace of the Saudi agenda is seen in Jordan’s state media, some of Lebanon’s television channels and smaller newspapers, and virtually across the board in Riyadh’s close Gulf Arab allies like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Perhaps the most potent example of the influence of Riyadh’s big spending is seen in the media of Egypt.
Under the rule of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Egyptian government and affiliated state agencies have almost completely brought the local media – both state and privately owned – under their control, turning what at best were vehicles of diverse views into loyal organs of the state.
At the same time, el-Sissi’s government has received billions of dollars from the Saudis since 2013 to shore up Egypt’s battered economy. Powerful pro-Saudi talk show hosts often remind viewers that as many as three million Egyptians work in Saudi Arabia, sending home billions of dollars in remittances every year.
So when the Khashoggi affair erupted, Egyptian media staunchly stood by the kingdom’s initial denials of any wrongdoing. Commentators also strongly promoted the idea that Qatar and Turkey were somehow conspiring to undermine Saudi Arabia.
Egypt’s government shares Saudi Arabia’s rivalry with those two countries because of their support of the Muslim Brotherhood, an out- lawed Islamist group.
Still, there were some signs of criticism, albeit cautious, in the few remaining somewhat independent voices left in Egyptian media.
One was the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, which featured a frontpage op-ed by Waheed Hamed, one of Egypt’s top movie script writers: “It is deeply regrettable that the media have abandoned their basic principles now that they are under state control again.”
Still, he did not mention the Khashoggi case.
A cartoonist went further, showing a school art teacher praising a young pupil to his mother.
“Touch wood, your son seems to be following current affairs. He drew a butcher’s shop when I asked him to draw a consulate.”
In Saudi Arabia itself, some voices not in complete sync with the state treaded carefully.
Faisal J. Abbas, editor of the English-language Arab News, called the Saudi media’s handling of the Khashoggi story a “disgrace to the profession” and even directed some of the blame on the government.
“We cannot be talking about reforms and a new culture of accountability in this country if official phones go silent the moment a big story breaks,” he wrote.
“Yes, authorities needed time to complete their investigation, but in the world of fast-breaking news, two weeks is an eternity.
“Officials need to learn that if they don’t tell their story, someone else will – more often than not, the enemies of the Kingdom.”
And when that happens, there is no running away from it.
On Thursday, Saudi officials finally admitted that Khashoggi’s killing was not an accident.
As the Saudi state TV stated: “Information from the Turkish side affirms that the suspects in Khashoggi’s case premeditated their crime.”