01 ISSUE I
DECEMBER 2024
DECEMBER 2024
Can Media Generate Change and Accountability?
The murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi also put on clear display the regime’s soft power media strategy.
By Niyati Pendekanti
On October 2, 2018, the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi visited his country’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. No one saw him leave. Two weeks later, Turkish police were allowed to inspect the premises and ruled that Saudi government officials had murdered him. The CIA and the United Nations later concluded that Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman (MBS) had ordered the assassination. His murder inside a diplomatic post shocked the world. In the subsequent days and weeks, the number of journalists stationed outside the consulate multiplied, and the story garnered widespread media coverage and attention. Once the consulate finally opened its doors to investigators, Turkish police proved that Khashoggi’s killers suffocated him to death shortly after entering the consulate, then dismembered his body and disposed of it. On October 2, 2018, the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi visited his country’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. No one saw him leave. Two weeks later, Turkish police were allowed to inspect the premises and ruled that Saudi government officials had murdered him. The CIA and the United Nations later concluded that Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman (MBS) had ordered the assassination. His murder inside a diplomatic post shocked the world. In the subsequent days and weeks, the number of journalists stationed outside the consulate multiplied, and the story garnered widespread media coverage and attention. Once the consulate finally opened its doors to investigators, Turkish police proved that Khashoggi’s killers suffocated him to death shortly after entering the consulate, then dismembered his body and disposed of it.
In December 2020, a little over two years after Khashoggi’s murder, the documentary film “The Dissident: The Untold Story of the Murder that Shook the World” came out. Directed by American Bryan Fogel, it alternates between past and present events (it cuts across events non-chronologically), incorporates news clippings and articles, interviews with various people involved, videos of Khashoggi, and other (info)graphics. To grasp the implications of being labeled a ‘dissident,’ it is essential first to understand how journalism, along with other forms of speech, functions in Saudi Arabia. “You cannot have an opinion in Saudi Arabia,” says Omar Abdulaziz Alzahrani, a Saudi national and dissident. He fled the country to continue voicing his criticisms. Wadah Khanfar, the former Managing Director of Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned global news channel, states that journalists in Saudi Arabia are “tools of the regime,” describing Khashoggi as initially part of that regime before he broke with it. As a result, for Khanfar, Khashoggi also “resembles every beautiful ideal that journalism stands for….objectivity, credibility, and neutrality.”
While Saudi Arabia was already exercising significant control over state media, MBS’ political takeover changed things – for the worse, in the realm of journalistic ideals and free speech. MBS assumed near total control and solidified his own (social) media army. But Saudi Arabia boasts enough of a hard power arsenal to make you wonder why they needed to deploy soft power in the first place. According to international relations scholar and former US diplomat Joseph Nye, “power in a global information age, more than ever, will include a soft dimension of attraction as well as hard dimensions,” MBS seems to be adopting this “smart power” strategy that combines both.
By introducing supposedly progressive policies, amongst other changes, MBS tries to project a particular narrative of Saudi Arabia on the global stage. Khashoggi supported MBS’ vision for the country but recognized that it was coming at the cost of the freedom to express opinions that the government didn’t agree with. He began voicing his concerns, slowly antagonizing the Saudi government. When the government initiated a crackdown on dissidents, Khashoggi left the country. He found himself in Washington, where he started writing articles for the Washington Post. He criticized the Saudi regime, society, and MBS in these columns. The Saudis predictably weren’t pleased. “Reputation has always mattered in world politics, but the role of credibility becomes an even more important power resource,” argued Joseph Nye and Khashoggi, who had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the government, was poking holes in the narrative they were building.
Saudi Arabia has an unprecedented social media population, with almost 80% on Twitter. “Twitter became the parliament of the Arabs,” claims Iyad El-Baghdadi, an Arab activist, adding that “if the [Saudi government] can control Twitter, they can control the public.” Well aware of this, MBS created a Twitter army, hiring thousands to drown out critics of his policies or the government by spamming their tweets with posts supporting MBS. This pro-government virtual army called the “Flies,” ensured state narratives were trending inside the country. The journalist Kyle Chayka, who has written about the cynical turn of social media, notes that “these networks [are] no longer an escape from the power structures of the physical world but a way of reinforcing them.”
In response to MBS’s “Flies,” Alzahrani’s strategy was to create his own Twitter army, which he coined the “Bees.” Here, Alzahrani followed the logic established by Spanish social theorist Manuel Castells: "It is through the media, both mass media and horizontal networks of communication, that nonstate actors influence people’s minds.” The Saudi government owns all the satellite networks operating in the country. To avoid being captured by the government, Alzahrani wanted to buy American sim cards and organize dissidents and volunteers into structured groups. Khashoggi stepped in to fund the operation, which served as the final step in his becoming a ‘dissident’ and the Saudi regime’s consequent hatred of him.
The gruesome details of Khashoggi’s murder created a furor globally, especially among journalists. Monroe Price observes that “the ubiquity of media and their capacity to provide unfiltered access to harsh global events increases emotional impact.”
The critical question here, then, in line with the so-called “CNN Effect,” is whether journalism and media were powerful enough to hold the Saudi government accountable in the face of damning evidence. The short and somewhat bitter answer is no. On October 23, 2018, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, MBS hosted a major conference, only to face a half-empty room. A massive deal between the Saudi government and Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post (where Khashoggi wrote his column) fell through as well. The Post had launched a campaign called ‘Justice for Jamal.’ (It later turned out that in retaliation, MBS had authorized his security police to bug Bezos’ phone.) But that is where the responses directly affecting MBS and Saudi Arabia end. While those close to Jamal continue to fight for justice, with technological advances and an “explosion of information,” Nye states that “attention…becomes a scarce resource” on the Internet, and movements tend to lose momentum as attention is diverted to newer issues. At the time of the documentary’s release and to date, there have been no global sanctions against Saudi Arabia, and the world’s most powerful heads of state attended the G20 summit hosted in the country by MBS in 2020 – despite conclusive evidence that Khashoggi’s murder was a state-sanctioned operation.
To Saudi Arabia, soft power is more of a complementary tool, as “The Dissident” shows, with most of its strength and pull on the global stage still originating from its hard power resources. Khanfar sadly points out in the film: “If you can kill Jamal and get away with it, who can you not kill?” The documentary captures the harsh realities of those committed to protecting their freedom of speech, the risks and sacrifices they undertake, the significance and limitations of journalism and media, and, in this case, states’ prioritization of power over justice.
Niyati Pendekanti is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.