The fake news thingy

Dear Saudi friends,

A few months ago, I decided to go back to Twitter. I don’t really like Twitter, I am more a Facebook kinda girl but I was curious about you and your conversations, and I was told those conversations are happening on Twitter. So I went back to Twitter.

I started following officials, ministers and embassies, I also started following a few regular Saudis. I started reading conversations. Honestly, I must have pressed “translate” a thousand times at least by now. I can tell you the translation from Arabic is pretty bad, but I am grateful it’s there.

I learnt a lot about you. I felt you were a country that was proud of its past, of its traditions, but with the new vision the Crown Prince has been promoting, I feel you also are a country that looks quite eagerly to the future.

But then, there was this thing.

It came up a lot in conversations, and honestly, it surprised me.

It came up when there were those rumors that the Crown Prince was dead. It came up a few other times randomly, in conversations about how Saudi Arabia is seen from abroad.

Each time Saudis were complaining about media being biased, about media reporting fake news, about western media falling for the propaganda of your enemies in the region.

That idea really surprised me, and it surprised me how frequently it came up in conversations.

Dear Saudi friends, I think you are underestimating how difficult it might be for western journalists to report about Saudi Arabia.

See, to report the news accurately, to explain how events fit in a bigger picture, you have to understand how a country works.

But the truth is, relatively speaking, Saudi Arabia is a country that is hard to understand for a westerner.

One thing is that you are a absolute monarchy. That alone makes you hard to understand because there are no more absolute monarchies in the West. It creates a lot of fantasies. We have this idea that in absolutely monarchies, anything is possible. And your history actually backs that point. You are a country where the Crown Prince once forced the king, his brother to step down, a country where the king was once shot at gunpoint by his nephew.

Considering this history, I think it’s only natural that Western media reported on rumors according to which the Crown Prince was shot. As a communication professional, I think the rumors could have been handled better by the Crown Prince's team, there was a lot of confusion, you are left thinking that “something” actually happened but we might never know what exactly.

I think God will give your Crown Prince a long life to do everything he plans to do, but the truth is, if he really had been shot dead, would this have been announced right away? I am honestly not sure.

Sometimes, I have the feeling people in Saudi Arabia complain about fake news because Western media don’t report the news the same way as Saudi media. Some Saudis seem to have an incredible trust in your own media. I honestly don’t have that much trust in French media, not because they have an agenda, not because they are lying to us, but just because journalists are humans with their limitations.

I cannot really judge Saudi media, I see too little of it but I can judge the media of the country where I live, which is also an absolute monarchy. I live in the UAE, I like my life here but I also know of some aspects that would need the leadership’s attention, and yet, the local media never reports about those aspects, I suppose because they don’t want to displease authorities. Maybe it’s a bit the same in Saudi Arabia, it’s not the way it should be, but it’s human.

All that being said, I can see things are changing with the Crown Prince. It’s certainly a great move that he’s giving long interviews to the media to explain his policies and his vision. But for a long time, you have been a closed country and a closed society, a country where leaders rarely talked to the media. 

Still to this day, someone like me who is interested in Saudi Arabia cannot visit easily because tourist visas are not available. And if I went, would I be able to ask questions without getting in trouble? Would people trust me, a westerner, enough to answer my questions honestly? Those are the difficulties, I suppose, every western journalist is running into, even to this day.

And because this is not a new thing, it has affected our understanding of Saudi Arabia for decades. I have been fascinated over the last few months by how you assume Westerners know as much about your history as you know about your history. We don’t. His Highness the Crown Prince recently mentioned in an interview to NBC what happened in 1979. He mentioned this briefly as if everybody watching NBC that day already knew.

But the truth is, and I double-checked this by asking a few people around me, most westerners have no idea what happened in your country in 1979. We might know about the Iranian revolution but we have no idea how this impacted you. And most people in the West also don’t know about the siege of Mecca because, as I recently discovered, Saudi authorities back then didn’t want Western media to report on it. French special forces played a part in ending the siege and despite that, this siege remains largely unknown even in France.

Because we don’t know about what a turning point 1979 was, most people in the West, including journalists, assume that Saudi Arabia was always the way it was those last 40 years. People hear about the cinemas, they assume cinemas are opening for the first time, they usually don’t know that cinemas existed in the 70s (out of honesty, I would also say that most Westerners really don’t care).

Sometimes, I think the media coverage of Saudi Arabia translates a low level of implication. Sometimes, I have a feeling part of the foreign press is a bit lazy when they are reporting about Saudi Arabia because they can, because nobody will complain, because nobody will challenge their interpretation. 

I recently bumped into an issue of Bloomberg Middle East. A picture of the Crown Prince on the cover. Your Crown Prince is a handsome man, but this picture clearly wasn’t his best one. If I had worked for him like I want to, I surely would have made a call to Bloomberg to complain about this cover. And certainly their regional art director would have made an extra effort to pick a better picture of His Highness next time. You might think it’s a detail, but we live in a world where every detail counts. Plus, President Macron’s press team calls media to complain, why would the Crown Prince’s team not do it?

Also, I have a journalist friend and she was telling me recently how whenever she reports about Turkey, she gets tons of messages from Turkish people correcting her. “I’m on my toes whenever I report about Turkey. I triple-check before I write anything” she told me. Apparently Turkish people are known for that. Maybe Saudi people complain to themselves, but why not write to the journalists directly if you read something that’s not accurate or misleading?

With this caveat in mind, I think most Western media report about the Middle East to the best of their understanding. What you call “fake news” actually mostly translates the low level of understanding westerners have of Saudi Arabia. Most western media mean to report accurately but sometimes they misinterpret facts completely because they just don’t know and understand any better.

You might tell me that ignorance is not an excuse. I would agree but in my opinion, if you are facing issues because of someone else’s wrong perceptions of you, it doesn’t help to see yourself as a victim and do nothing about those wrong perceptions.

What I can say, is that comparately to the size and the importance of your country, there are few books available in the West about you. I think that’s something you should work on because it would help, that’s something I would love to work on. As I recently said on Twitter, I have decided to stand up for Saudi Arabia and I certainly see how it hurts your country that the overwhelming majority of books available about Saudi Arabia are books written by geopolitical experts. Those books, despite how interesting they sometimes are, tend to present your country like a political system, they make you look like a “problem”, not like a country with real life people living normal lives.

If I was working for your authorities, I would tell them that in my opinion, publishing good books about your country, making them widely available in different languages is key. Books, and even more movies, are a good way to break the stereotypes that you are continuously facing.

I hope this helps. Thank you for reading :)