24 Time December 23–30, 2019
O
ne year ago, TIME named
besieged journalists the
2018 Person of the Year,
gathered under the rubric
The guardians and The War
on TruTh. Neither that war nor its
consequences for democracy have
abated in the intervening 12 months.
For Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman, whose henchmen killed
and dismembered Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi
consulate, life goes on much as before.
In the spring, after the CIA detected
new threats against Khashoggi’s
associates, warnings went out to
Canada, Norway and Washington,
D.C. In November, the FBI arrested
two former employees of Twitter, the
platform often described as Saudi
Arabia’s closest thing to a public
square. Both were charged with passing
on information about dissidents to
bin Salman’s government.
By then, the crown prince had gone
back to doing interviews with foreign
press. Thirteen months and one day
after Khashoggi’s murder, he presided
over an IPO that valued the Saudi
national oil company at $1.7 trillion, a
world record. And in early December,
the kingdom convened the Saudi
Media Forum, to examine, according
to its website, “challenges” facing the
news media, “the formation of public
opinion in the new environment of
communication and etc.”
“Somehow, journalists and business-
people are attending,” marvels Court-
ney Radsch, advocacy director for the
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ),
a New York–based nonprofit. “Moham-
med bin Salman has gotten off with
complete impunity.”
How? Hints lurk in CPJ’s new
global survey, which documents whatRadsch calls “an environment where it’s
increasingly perilous to do journalism.”
Imprisonment remains a favored tactic
for repressive governments, and Saudi
Arabia now ranks third in the number of
journalists behind bars, tied with Egypt.
China leads, with Turkey second. But
naming and shaming works only when
shame is enforced.
“Where’s my favorite dictator?”
U.S. President Donald Trump called out
at a Group of Seven meeting in Septem-
ber, searching for Egyptian President
Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. The leader of the free
world has also heaped praise on the lead-
ers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and China.
Trump being Trump, Americans
shrug—but overseas, a message is
received.
Consider Myanmar, where the
Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw
Soe Oo, who joined Khashoggi as Person
of the Year cover subjects, walked out
of jail on May 6. Like their sentence,
their freedom came at the whim of the
generals who have long controlled theA DARKENING
WORLD
FOR NEWS
By Karl Vick