Saudi Arabia documents by Year:
How the Saudis may have spied on Jamal Khashoggi
October 31, 2018 10:33 AM ET
Omar Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old Saudi Arabian dissident, can still remember the time Jamal Khashoggi, the storied Saudi journalist, unfollowed him on Twitter. It was in 2015, and Khashoggi had been tapped to head a new TV network called Al-Arab, a partnership between a member of the royal family and...
Saudi control of Arab media, lamented by Khashoggi, shapes coverage of his death
October 30, 2018 2:59 PM ET
It is a cruel irony that Jamal Khashoggi's last unpublished column for The Washington Post was a call for press freedom in the Arab world. His homeland, Saudi Arabia, has spent the last three decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that never happens....
The path(s) to justice in Jamal Khashoggi's murder
October 23, 2018 3:41 PM ET
In an emotional address to Turkey's parliament today, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi as a savage and premeditated act and demanded that Saudi officials be brought to Turkey to stand trial. Most of the information about the investigation that has emerged has come...
'New' Saudi Arabia ushers in even more repressive climate for journalists
September 25, 2018 10:04 AM ET
Marwan al-Mureisi knew the rules: even in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's "new" Saudi Arabia, issues touching on politics, religion, or the royal family were out of bounds. So in his reporting for the privately owned website Sabq and other outlets, al-Mureisi wrote about science, technology, and the need...
Undiscoverable: How Al-Jazeera's Snapchat channel disappeared from three Gulf nations
September 10, 2018 12:35 PM ET
Search for "Al-Jazeera" on Snapchat, and the first result that comes up is a ubiquitous publisher channel in the app's famed vertical layout. That is, unless you are in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), or Bahrain. Users in these counties are instead offered a list of stores...
Amid Gulf tensions, press is used as a political pawn
June 8, 2017 5:38 PM ET
Today Bahrain became the latest Gulf nation to put pressure on news outlets amid political tension, when its Interior Ministry announced that anyone publishing support or sympathy for Qatar faces up to five years in prison. The announcement came the day after the United Arab Emirates used the threat...
In censored Saudi Arabia, Raif Badawi filled a journalistic void
June 17, 2015 4:34 PM ET
On the third anniversary of the arrest of liberal activist and writer Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, his supporters all over the world are working hard to prevent what may lay ahead: the completion of a 10-year, thousand-lash sentence. To be effective in changing Badawi's future, it is important...
After Charlie Hebdo attack, vigils, protests and publishing bans
January 27, 2015 2:18 PM ET
Protests against the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were held in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and parts of Africa over the weekend, as crowds demonstrated against the magazine's portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad, according to news reports....
Saudi censorship blurs lines between journalism, activism
May 20, 2014 4:59 PM ET
Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools--a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities--are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string...
Most censored nations each distort the Net in own way
May 2, 2012 4:00 PM ET
One big reason for the Internet's success is its role as a universal standard, interoperable across the world. The data packets that leave your computer in Botswana are the same as those which arrive in Barbados. The same is increasingly true of modern mobile networks. Standards are converging: You...