But yhere is a world of difference between a journalist asking critical questions, and bombing a country.
It's a journalist's task to ask autocratic rulers critical questions. The Bloomberg piece does not do this, instead raving "how comfortable meeting him was".
The target audience of this piece is the US population. The house of Saud invests a great deal of money in misleading the US population, so as to ensure that the US continues its support of the status quo, which is highly convenient for the House of Saud, but a disaster for just about anybody else. See e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/20/...
The question how to engineer a peaceful transition away from the House of Saud to a meaningful democracy (or even a more enlightened dictatorship such as Dubai), is a deep and complex one, and I don't purport to have an answer. But it's good to understand how autocratic rulers such as the House of Saud manipulate public opinion.
Not always, unless you are doing a hit piece. Sometimes it is also a task to simply gather information on a subject that people know very little about. Sometimes the process of gathering info is so sensitive that you don't want to do anything to influence the observations you make like cause discomfort and create moments of silence.
There were some important revelations in this article. It shows the leadership is trying to make changes. It highlights the stakes involved. It shows the geopolitical map of Saudi Arabia. That is not fluff.
It's in Bloomberg's best interests to make the ME look less like a one-trick pony so general market consensus goes up (any volatility = TV going off mute + viewership retention & people going to their Bloomberg terminals, etc).
It's in the journo's best interests because he gets '8 exclusive unprecedented hours' upping his profile so his executive editor will choose him for the next interview with Bill Gross or whomever.
It's in the House of Saud's best interest for a wide variety of reasons. Everyone's got to get their pound (Franc, greenback, yen, ruble, or .. )
W/r/t having a nation with a PR/lobby in the US - I guarantee you every nation with a GDP of eh maybe half a trillion will have one. Look at the registered employee list of K-street firms and their clientele.
The closest thing you'll get to 'hard hitting questions' (and I'm not talking hit-pieces, I'm talking about Kronkite and Murrow) is the BBC Newshour (Lyse Ducette and Owen Bennet Jones -- though Americans find it dry, I couldn't love their coverage more, although it's a bit of a family love-affair), PBS Newshour (basically everyone on their staff), and to some extent Shane & Sooresh's VICE which has retained some of the best producers and on-the-ground coverage I've seen in recent news.
Yes, and it's largely because of Saudi Arabia:
"Saudi Arabia has maintained a high level of oil production despite the slump in crude oil prices, arguing it needs to protect its market share in an economy in flux because of the glut of U.S. oil."
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2015/07/13/...
Case in point: Here[1] is an article that spends a considerable chunk talking about how Norway pours money into Brookings Institution and Center for Global Development and others to influence US policy.
"The country has committed at least $24 million to an array of Washington think tanks over the past four years, according to a tally by The Times, transforming these nonprofits into a powerful but largely hidden arm of the Norway Foreign Affairs Ministry. "
Lobbying the US government is basically essential for any foreign power because of the outsize influence the US has on the world.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers...
That said, I can understand, to a degree "comfort" netting him, etc. It is a head of state, but more importantly, the whole government/ruling family is quite mysterious. You have no idea how practical his ideas will be, especially at that scale.
Still, though, you're right. Any amount of serious journalism here would have been welcome.
I am not a lover the SA regime, but it's important that one's lack of geopolitical knowledge doesn't spread more misinformation.
No it's not. It is, as a whole, the job of journalism to do that, but not necessarily a specific journalist's job.
A journalist's job is to tell the truth, not necessarily the whole truth. There is often quite a bit of value in getting the perspective of a single person or entity on a specific subject without attempting to add full and complete context.
Does it occur to you that the problem here is that Western-exported democracies aren't democracies, but instead puppet states? This has little resemblance to a real democracy founded by members of its own nation with their own cultural values.
There's a big difference between invading Saudi Arabia and setting up a banana republic, and journalism that criticizes the Saudis for their authoritarianism.
> Tackling that shouldn't be dismissed because we don't like the government.
No one is doing that. We can accurately describe all of Saudi Arabia's issues, including their authoritarian rulers.
https://geopoliticsmadesuper.com/2016/04/20/why-saudi-arabia...
In short: liberal democracy requires liberal elites to be present and not vastly outnumbered. Without this condition fulfilled what you get after a revolution is what you had before despotism: tribalism and sectarianism, permanent civil war and the likes.
It's an entirely Western colonist idea that poor people in developing countries can't handle democracy and therefore have to accept dictatorships (which just happen to align with Western interests).
Look, no one is able to "handle democracy" before being prepared for this. Isn't this obvious? Even the Tsar Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, went and for a couple of years studied technical skills in Holland (IIRC - I may be wrong on all the details here...) instead of simply saying "let's make our shipyards modern! now!".
I never said that the societies in the Middle East can't ever do democracy. I just said that if they tried right now the results wouldn't be pretty. Give them another two or three decades of successive education and liberalization and they will be able to build a modern, well-functioning democracy overnight!
If the elites are not vastly outnumbered, they kind of aren't elite anymore, they're just normal people.
I think the relationship between the West and western-supported regimes is a lot more complicated.
By democracy, you mean dictatorship, right? The Shah and Saddam were both supported by Western oil, industrial, and finance interests and were hardly "democratic".
SA's problems are plenty, but it shares the entire region's SPOF economy. Tackling that shouldn't be dismissed because we don't like the government. Suffering the hardest happens to the least of people, so making the transition to a post-oil economy as smooth as possible - House of Saud in tact - still prevents an incredible amount of suffering.