Media in Saudi Arabia gears up for ‘year of influence’

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Saudi journalists could be forgiven for thinking they were at the centre of the world this week.

As the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, met the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in Riyadh’s historic Diriyah district to deliberate on the war in Ukraine, down the road in the Hilton hotel complex 2,000 media leaders came together in the fourth Saudi Media Forum to discuss how the kingdom can exploit its position as a news fulcrum in rapidly changing times.

Saudi media minister Salman Al Dosari, opening the event, launched a “global harmony” initiative for 2025, which he called Saudi Arabia’s “year of influence”. 

The kingdom certainly means to press home its new-found position as a force in global diplomacy – and to use media to do that.

After last year’s Saudi Media Forum, I wrote about the “bravado” on display at the event, and if anything this self-confidence on the part of the Saudi media industry seems to have grown in the past 12 months.

“Who says you should be quiet when you are attacked? You should not be afraid to protect your position,” he said, to a big round of applause.

The SMF organisers obviously decided to pack all the star turns into the opening morning, because next up was the former British prime minister Boris Johnson, looking relaxed and tanned after a family holiday on the Red Sea.

Johnson said all the right things, of course, confidently predicting that Saudi Arabia will be the number one tourism destination, praising the progress of the Vision 2030 transformation strategy under Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and exhorting global policymakers to find a two-state solution for Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

On President Trump’s plans for a Gaza “riviera”, he lapsed briefly into Franglais: “Donnez moi un break”, he said to muffled titters around the hall from those who got his joke (the minority).

But he, too, was assertive in his view of the media.

“Politicians should not have a good relationship with media – they hold up a mirror to your faults and you have to fight back,” he said, with deep experience from his time as PM and as a former journalist.

My own panel session took place on day two in front of a slightly less crowded hall, but nonetheless a decent-sized audience to hear me, former BBC World Service director Jamie Angus and the vastly experienced Middle East correspondent Amira El Ahl discuss the role of media in crisis reporting, under the expert moderation of the editor of Asharq Al Awsat, Badr Al Qahtani.

I must admit I felt something of a fraud alongside El Ahl, who reported live from Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, and Angus, who has directed global news coverage of some of the biggest events of recent years.

As a business journalist, my crisis reporting has been confined to coverage of the various financial and economic disasters that have hit the world over the past 40 years. Not quite the same as ducking bullets in a flak jacket.

The procedures of traditional newsrooms – editing and fact-checking before publication – still have valuable lessons for the instant world of social media

But the tenor of the discussion was really about the challenges presented by social media, artificial intelligence and “citizen journalism” to traditional mainstream media – and on that I have firm views.

Both Angus and El Ahl shared my view that trust in traditional media was being endangered by social media platforms such as X, which often fail to verify and authenticate “news” before publishing it.

We agreed that the structures and procedures of traditional newsrooms – the whole process of reporting, sub-editing, editing and fact-checking before publication – still had valuable lessons for the instant world of social media.

“It is better to be correct, and second, than to be wrong and first,” said El Ahl, which got a ripple of applause around the hall.

I left the event impressed, not for the first time, at the enthusiasm and dedication of the young Saudi men and (especially) women who, despite all the challenges to modern media in their country and the world, want to make a career in the increasingly dark world of journalism.

Perhaps there is some hope after all.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia