One aspect of the recent WikiLeaks documents regarding Saudi Arabia that will deserve closer attention in time is what they reveal about Western media’s approach to news and governments in the Middle East, specifically the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. It has become axiomatic in media studies to consider Arab media as archetypally manipulated, manipulative, slanted, a vehicle for regime propaganda.

There is a long history replete with good reasons for this: the Free Officers used radio to announce the 1952 coup in Egypt and media was moulded into a critical tool of the Nasser regime. That set the standard for similar policies among the Arab countries, who often took Egyptian state media as a model. Media manipulation has morphed over the decades into different forms. There are no state-owned media outlets as such in Saudi Arabia but rather a network of newspapers and TV channels owned by Saudi princes or their clients. Gulf oil states have challenged supremacy in Arab media, through operations like Al Jazeera and the MBC network; had Baathist Iraq survived we may have had to contend with another form of mass media vehicle centred on oil power plus a faux Nasserist message. The Saudi media empire is aimed at consumption of entertainment and dimming the activist imperative in politics (discussed in detail in chapter 7 of my The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia, 2012). Nasser’s i’lam ta’bawi – a media of mobilisation – has been swapped for an i’lam tanwimi – a media of soporifics. Arab media was also hardly alone in developing in this form: the historical quirk is that is has survived. Media became an element in European powers’ political matrix during the era of colonial expansion in the 19th century and Europe’s fascisms subsequently took its powers of mobilisation to new levels.

Yet the problematization of Arab media in Western discussions, be it media or academic, has not come without an implied discourse regarding Western media. If Arab media is backward, controlling and illiberal, Western media is progressive, independent and open. Arab media has, in other words, in classic Orientalist fashion, become the Other against which Western media, academia and politicians further construct an image of Western civic culture that is rather self-satisfied, arrogant and smug. It is also inaccurate, and that’s where the SaudiLeaks come in.

Memos involving the foreign ministry, information ministry and royal palace demonstrate an intense, paranoid level of concern regarding the output of Western media during the early period of the Arab uprisings. The interference is not restricted to Saudi Arabia but extends to its satrap Bahrain. The documents are a window to the pressures the Saudi government put on Western media; the other half of the story, not so far revealed in the documents, is that media largely caved to the pressure. Coverage of the Bahraini uprising was essentially smothered to death through Saudi harassment of editors and journalists on the ground.

The critical dynamic here is access: news agencies in particular need to be present on the ground and at least in the case with which I am familiar they will bend over backwards to ensure that presence. Once guaranteed the presence of a correspondent in a country like Saudi Arabia the correspondent and his editor will not be minded to push the limits in order to ensure the continued presence. The idea of “being there” in case one day “the big event” happens becomes an empty end in itself. The journalists sit pretty on their salaries salving their consciences over killing the news about the country by convincing themselves they are waiting for a revolution. This deceit serves all: the government which can boast that it has allowed in global media, the media institution which can claim it has the most extensive global presence, and Reuters clients who get their financial news out of the kingdom – the true aim of the operation. Regards Bahrain, editors’ fear of Saudi anger extended, in what I saw, to a correspondent being forced to write “witnesses said” instead of making clear that violent clashes he was writing about were experienced personally. Or rather these edits were made by scared middlemen, ordered b Middle East editors to do their bidding.

Saudi harassment of journalists and pressure on editors is effected through surprisingly simple means: the key figure is Nawaf Obaid. A client of the al-Faisal’s, he was established as a regime-backed scholar through attachment with Faisal Foundation and co-authored a book with Anthony Cordesman (National Security in Saudi Arabia, 2005) and the paper Saudi Militants in Iraq: Assessment and Kingdom’s Response (2005). He also published alone “The power of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic leaders’, in Middle East Quarterly in 1999, a classic defence of Al Saud as the champions of liberalised public space in the face of the putatively unchallengeable power of the clerical establishment. After a failed attempt to complete a doctorate at Kings College, London he became a fellow of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. These positions are a front for his real job: providing the semi-official, off-the-record comment to Western media and insider view to think tanks in return for access to the country or to him as one of the few official interlocuters. When Reuters tried to appoint a new correspondent in 2011, it was Obaid who controlled the process: the information minister was simply cc-ed in the emails. The Saudi political reality is not so tightly controlled that Obaid is the only gateway – various domestic organisations that hold international conferences are able to swing visas too, bypassing the ministry of information and Obaid. But for journalists he has made himself invaluable. Obaid also recruits Saudis, or others, for his network of regime boosters, people who will work in Saudi-controlled journalism or think tankery, in English or Arabic, putting forward the government view in various venues and forums in return for considerable recompense.

The framework for discussing Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries follows the liberal rights discourse that Europe has deployed vis-a-vis non-Europeans since the 19th century, plus the neoliberal economic approach of the 1980s and what has been deemed “moderation” on the Israeli-Palestinian question. Privatisation and openings to Israel of any manner and in any context are always framed in positive terms, while political and human rights are established as works in progress. While I would not question the third of these as a desirable outcome in any society, their instrumentalisation in Western media discourse is intimately tied to Western governments and power. In Saudi Arabia, the working paradigm for discussion of King Abdullah’s rule was “reform” of a social and even political nature. Thus media was expected to string out stories that would establish progress against this metric. It became clear at an early stage that this reform was an illusion which had as its target Western media/power as much as it had a domestic audience in mind. The reform discourse has in fact allowed for abuse to take place in the knowledge that Western criticism will rarely be forthcoming. In one case it did: when a rape victim in the Eastern Province was sentenced in 2007 to lashes for mixing with unrelated men it took comments from the Bush administration to embarrass the king into taking action. The point here is not to strengthen the link between domestic rights and foreign interventions but to note that Western media by and large follows the cues it gets from power.

The taming of Western media in the Gulf was an important goal of Saudi Arabia in 2011-2. Its success speaks not so much to its powers of persuasion or invidious threats than to the shared nexus of interests constituted by corporate global media, Western governments and hyper-dynastic oil states. The SaudiLeaks are likely come to represent a significant source of material on this question.