Global media race to cover lifting of Saudi women driving ban

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Majdooleen, who is among the first Saudi women allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, drives her car in her neighborhood in Riyadh on June 24, 2018. (REUTERS/Sarah Dadouch)
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In this June 22, 2018 photo, a Saudi journalist interviews a woman as she tests a car driving simulator with her son, at a road safety event for female drivers launched at the Riyadh Park Mall. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
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Saudi national and newly licensed Reem Farahat, an employee of Careem, a chauffeur car booking service, prepares for a customer shuttle using her car in Riyadh, on June 24, 2018. (AFP / FAYEZ NURELDINE)
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In this June 23, 2018 photo, Maha Mohammed practices driving a motorbike at the Bikers Skills Institute in Riyadh. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
Updated 26 June 2018
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Global media race to cover lifting of Saudi women driving ban

  • ‘There is a great hunger to know what is changing in Saudi Arabia,’ says Bloomberg editor
  • Time magazine featured interviews with Saudi Arabia’s first female taxi drivers employed by the regional ride-sharing firm Careem. 

LONDON: The sight of Saudi women taking to the roads as the clock struck midnight on June 24 caught the imagination of much of the world’s media. 

The official lifting of the ban on female drivers generated a multitude of headlines around the globe as reporters filmed women jumping into cars and driving around the streets of Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. The news kept media commentators busily assessing the impact of the decision on Saudi Arabia and wider Arab world. 

“‘I feel free like a bird’ — Saudi women celebrate as driving ban lifted,” read a headline in The Guardian newspaper, which is based in London. 

“‘Everything is an adventure now’: Saudi women celebrate new driving freedoms as ban is lifted,” a headline in the UK’s Independent proclaimed. 

Time magazine featured interviews with Saudi Arabia’s first female taxi drivers employed by the regional ride-sharing firm Careem. 

The New York Times’ coverage included short interviews with Saudi women on their opinions about the lifting of the ban, as well as what other reforms they would like to see in terms of women’s rights. 

While stories of Saudi women driving for the first time filled Twitter feeds and websites alike, there was also much interest about the wider implications on society. 

The Economist timed its “Special Report on Saudi Arabia” to coincide with the the lifting of the ban.

“We have long been interested in the reforms of Saudi Arabia. The Economist was the first international publication to interview (Crown Prince) Mohammed bin Salman on the record, and we broke the story of the planned IPO of Saudi Aramco in 2016,” Anton LaGuardia, author of the report and deputy foreign editor of The Economist, told Arab News.

“We have regularly covered developments in Saudi Arabia and the region. As the reforms gathered pace, we decided last year that we would have a wide-ranging special report on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in 2018.”

The publication also produced a short video of The Economist Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes driving in Riyadh on Sunday. 

“Women drivers is only one part of a broader process of social and economic liberalization, and of political change in the region, that will affect many aspects of life in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and the Arab and Islamic worlds,” LaGuardia said. 

Bloomberg also published extensive coverage of the lifting of the ban, including an assessment of the economic impact of the decision. According to the agency’s economists, the lifting of the ban could add $90 billion to the country’s economic output by 2030. 

“(Some might think that) Bloomberg, being a business-focused news organization, might not bother with this kind of story, but it is exactly the kind of story we would bother with. It is very much central to what we do — it cuts across everything,” said Riad Hamade, the news service’s Middle East and Africa executive editor.

“Women’s right to drive is not a self-contained issue. It impacts every part of Saudi society and it will have significant repercussions on how Saudis in general live their lives.”

“There is a great hunger to know what is changing — what is happening in Saudi Arabia and this is a pretty major change.

“The issue of women driving is an issue that I think every journalist and international investor that went into the Kingdom would ask authorities about. It is one of the things that a lot of people are wondering about and the fact that it has now changed has quite significant ramifications.”

While the majority of the world’s press perceived the lifting of the ban as a positive development for Saudi women, some publications did question whether there may continue to be some resistance to the ban from more conservative elements of society. 

“Still, many in this nation of 33 million were grappling with anxiety over this new freedom, both within families who never bought into the stereotype that women should be shut up at home, and those who sincerely believed what they had been taught since childhood,” read a New York Times article published June 24. 

Other articles also pointed to bureaucratic delays in some women getting their driving licenses in time for the lifting of the ban, while others pointed out that the end of the ban would not immediately benefit poorer elements of society, where families are still unable to buy a car. 


Getty Images, Shutterstock gear up for AI challenge with $3.7 bln merger

Updated 38 sec ago
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Getty Images, Shutterstock gear up for AI challenge with $3.7 bln merger

  • Deal faces potential antitrust scrutiny
  • Merger aims to cut costs and unlock new revenue streams as companies grapple with the rise of generative AI tools
LONDON: Getty Images said on Tuesday it would merge with rival Shutterstock to create a $3.7 billion stock-image powerhouse geared for the artificial intelligence era, in a deal likely to draw antitrust scrutiny.
The companies, two of the largest players in the licensed visual content industry, are betting that the combination will help them cut costs and grow their business by unlocking more revenue opportunities at a time when the growing use of generative AI tools such as Midjourney poses a threat to the industry.
Shutterstock shareholders can opt to receive either $28.80 per share in cash, or 13.67 shares of Getty, or a combination of 9.17 shares of Getty and $9.50 in cash for each Shutterstock share they own. The offer represents a deal value of more than $1 billion, according to Reuters calculations.
Shutterstock’s shares jumped 22.7 percent, while Getty was up 39.7 percent. Stocks of both companies have declined for at least the past four years, as the rising use of mobile cameras drives down demand for stock photography.
Getty CEO Craig Peters will lead the combined company, which will have annual revenues of nearly $2 billion and stands to benefit from Getty’s large library of visual content and the strong community on Shutterstock’s platform.
Peters downplayed the impact of AI on Tuesday and said that he was confident the merger would receive antitrust approval both in the United States and Europe.
“We don’t control the timing of (the approval), but we have a high confidence. This has been a situation where customers have not had choice. They’ve always had choice,” he said.
Some experts say US President-elect Donald Trump’s recent appointments to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division signal that there would be little change to the tough scrutiny that has come to define the regulator in recent years.
“With Gail Slater at the helm, the antitrust division is going to be a lot more aggressive under this Trump administration than it was under the first one,” said John Newman, professor of law at the University of Miami.
Regulators will examine how the deal impacts the old-school business model of selling images to legacy media customers, as well as the new business model of offering copyright-compliant generative-AI applications to the public.
The deal is expected to generate up to $200 million in cost savings three years after its close. Getty investors will own about 54.7 percent of the combined company, while Shutterstock stockholders will own the rest.
Getty competes with Reuters and the Associated Press in providing photos and videos for editorial use.

Israel extends closure of Al Jazeera’s West Bank office

Updated 07 January 2025
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Israel extends closure of Al Jazeera’s West Bank office

  • Israel suspended Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office for 45 days in September on charges of “incitement to and support for terrorism”
  • Announcement comes days after Palestinian Authority also suspended the network’s broadcasts for four months

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: Israeli authorities renewed a closure order for Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, days after the Palestinian Authority suspended the network’s broadcasts for four months.
An AFP journalist reported that Israeli soldiers posted the extension order Tuesday morning on the entrance of the building housing Al Jazeera’s offices in central Ramallah, a city under full Palestinian Authority security control.
The extension applies from December 22 and lasts 45 days.
In September, Israeli forces raided the Ramallah office and issued an initial 45-day closure order.
At the time, staff were instructed to leave the premises and take their personal belongings.
The move came months after Israel’s government approved a decision in May to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel, also closing its offices for an initial 45-day period, which was extended for a fourth time by a Tel Aviv court in September.
Later in September, Israel’s government announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has long been at odds with Al Jazeera, a dispute that has escalated since the Gaza war began following Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7.
The Israeli army has repeatedly accused the network’s reporters in Gaza of being “terrorist operatives” affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
The Qatari channel denies the accusations, and says Israel systematically targets its staff in Gaza.


Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes

Updated 07 January 2025
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Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes

  • Meta cited bias and excessive content reviews as key factor in ending fact-checking program
  • The social media company also announced plans to allow “more speech” by easing restrictions on discussions of mainstream topics like immigration and gender

LONDON: Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Starting in the US, Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
The social media company also said it plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.
Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board, which was set up to act as a referee on controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to working with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”


India press watchdog demands journalist murder probe

Freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar. (Supplied)
Updated 06 January 2025
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India press watchdog demands journalist murder probe

  • Chandrakar’s body was found on January 3 after police tracked his mobile phone records following his family reporting him missing

NEW DELHI: India’s media watchdog has demanded a thorough investigation after a journalist’s battered body was found stuffed in a septic tank covered with concrete.
Freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar, 28, had reported widely on corruption and a decades-old Maoist insurgency in India’s central Chhattisgarh state, and ran a popular YouTube channel “Bastar Junction.”
The Press Council of India expressed “concern” over the suspected murder of Chandrakar, calling for a report on the “facts of the case” in a statement late Saturday.
Chandrakar’s body was found on January 3 after police tracked his mobile phone records following his family reporting him missing.
Three people have been arrested.
More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of marginalized indigenous people in India’s resource-rich central regions.
Vishnu Deo Sai, chief minister of Chhattisgarh from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called Chandrakar’s death “heartbreaking” and promised the “harshest punishment” for those found responsible.
India was ranked 159 last year on the World Press Freedom Index, run by Reporters Without Borders.
 

 


Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump

Updated 05 January 2025
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Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump

  • Ann Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press
  • Wapo exec says the cartoon was rejected only to avoid repetition, because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon

A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.
Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of “political cowardice” and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes’ sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in a show of solidarity.
“Tyranny ends at pen point,” the association said. “It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a punch-drunk boxer.”
The Post’s communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press on Saturday with a statement from David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes’ “interpretation of events.”
He said he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and was set to publish another.
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. ... The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said.