Hasta La Gadget!

Something is happening in Saudi Arabia. The country is undergoing real change. Many commentators have written about it, but in some instances their observations have been based on a one-off visit comparing what they’ve just seen with the biases they’ve learned—without context or history.

I am by no means an expert on Saudi Arabia, but as someone who has visited the country over four dozen times in the past four decades and who has been able to conduct polling across the Kingdom for the past decade and a half, I want to share some conclusions from my just completed visit as well as some of my most recent public opinion polls.

In a real sense, Saudi Arabia is a new country that has always been changing. In the early 1950’s, for example, the population of Riyadh, the capitol, was in the tens of thousands. By 1980, when I made my first visit, it had grown to one million. Today Greater Riyadh is approaching seven million souls. There have been times when the city looked like a massive construction site with buildings or other infrastructure projects going up everywhere. Saudis have joked that their national bird was the crane.

Rapid urbanization came with a price. As rural people flooded into newly expanded urban areas, many experienced culture shock feeling a need to cling to the purity of the “old ways”—a not unexpected response.

With each passing year subtle but real changes have occurred. Some were the result of the tens of thousands of Saudis who studied abroad; others flowed from the transformations in daily life and social and economic relations that resulted from urbanization; still others reflected the impact globalization especially on Saudi youth. In any case, today’s Saudi Arabia is not the one I first visited a generation ago, with many Saudis living lives and connecting to the outside world in ways unimaginable to their grandparents. Traditions, however, remain and this is enough for some in the West to dismiss the country’s culture as frozen. It appears that if change doesn’t come at our pace, dressed in Western garb, and isn’t done “our way”—it’s not real change.

But even beyond this slow and steady evolution there is something new and significant taking place in the Kingdom. There is today a conscious and deliberate effort by Saudi leadership to speed up this process of transforming their society and to challenge some elements of the traditional culture that stand in the way of moving the country forward. Some of the impetus behind this effort is, no doubt, due to the need to move beyond dependence on oil revenues and government subsidized employment. Another important factor is the coming of age of a new generation of leaders who want to modernize their country, but to do so while being respectful of its traditions. Threading this needle is important since a significant segment of the population remains conservative and the young leadership is not inclined to totally upend the social order creating disruptive instability.

Today’s Saudi Arabia is not the one I first visited a generation ago, with many Saudis living lives and connecting to the outside world in ways unimaginable to their grandparents.

As part of this national effort at social and economic transformation, the number of Saudis studying abroad has increased to over two hundred thousand youngsters from all segments of Saudi society and all parts of the country. There are currently more women than men in college and women graduates are entering the workplace in ever increasing numbers. There has been a determined effort, working with international specialists, to modernize the education curriculum with changes on every level. On my most recent visit to Saudi Arabia, I received a briefing at the Ministry of Education, I was struck by: reforms in early childhood and elementary education; the new emphasis being given to math and science; the training programs that have been developed for teachers and aides preparing them to mainstream children with disabilities; and efforts to provide online and interactive educational opportunities for Saudis of all ages. These changes combined will no doubt produce even greater transformations in the years to come.

But what do Saudis think of their country and their own personal circumstances in this evolving social reality. There are dissidents, to be sure, both those who say change is not coming fast enough and those disgruntled souls who are repulsed by modernity and who condemn any threats to the old order. This is to be expected in any society experiencing change. But what our polling shows is that most Saudis are quite satisfied with their lives and are optimistic about the future. In a “quality of life” survey we conducted a few years ago in 22 countries, Saudi Arabia scored quite well—higher than the United States and most Western countries. More recent polling, since the launching of the national transformation program, have shown dramatic increases in both optimism and satisfaction ratings. There are concerns, to be sure, but on the whole, men and women, young and old, educated and less educated alike give life in their country good grades and have high expectation for the future. This confounds some American observers because they can only see Saudi Arabia through their own eyes, without paying attention to how the majority of Saudis see their own reality.

As ambitious and promising as the national transformation program is, it is also a risky undertaking. On the one hand, there are the expectations that promised change has created. This must be weighed against the backlash of Saudi conservatives who are already expressing concern with this orchestrated movement toward modernizing their society. I referred to it as “threading a needle” and it surely is.

Then there is the impact of the disastrous and costly war in Yemen. Saudi Arabia is deeply troubled by Iran’s aggressive ambitions and concerned with the destabilization of their southern neighbor. But their efforts to restore the legitimate government of Yemen that was deposed by an Iranian-backed movement, have not been successful. Reports of heavy civilian casualties have taken a horrific human toll on Yemenis and have contributed to tarnishing Saudi Arabia’s image in the West. And then there’s the cost—especially given declining oil revenues and the price tag associated with the national transformation effort.

Only a hardened cynic or a dyed-in-the-wool bigot would want to see the Saudi national transformation program fail. At the same time, it would naïve to assume that the coast is clear and all will inevitably work out in the end. Success is not assured, real problems remain and there will serious challenges in the future. But it should recognized that Saudis have taken their future in their own hands and are making change their way. They should be supported.

Follow @jjz1600 for more.

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Here’s an announcement that will likely only be of interest to a small cross-section of audiences: watch historians and/or Steve Jobs fanatics. Seiko has announced that it will be offering a limited re-release of one of its older watches made famous by a Steve Jobs portrait. The Japanese watch maker’s Chariot timepiece was seen on the wrist of the Apple … Continue reading

WASHINGTON ― If you’re just paying attention now to the race to chair the Democratic National Committee, you could be forgiven for thinking it is an election for a much bigger office.

The race that has lasted well over three months is finally coming to a close on Saturday. The candidates have participated in more than half a dozen public forums or televised debates.

And the two top contenders, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, each raised nearly $1 million as of the beginning of the month.

The Democrats’ trouncing at the polls in November meant it was likely that the DNC chair race would be more hotly contested than normal.

But this year’s contest has also attracted inordinate attention and resources because it is widely viewed as a proxy battle between the Democratic establishment and the party’s progressive wing. Perez, who backed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primary, has gained more traction among establishment figures. Ellison, a supporter of rival presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has won the enthusiasm of progressive activists.

The trouble for some of Ellison’s supporters in particular is that many of the 442 DNC members eligible to vote in the contest just don’t see it that way.

Missouri DNC member Brian Wahby endorsed Perez on Friday because of Perez’s “experience managing large organizations.”

“He has a good track record of turning around large organizations and it’s part of what we need,” added Iowa DNC member Andrea Philips  in explaining her support for Perez.

Wahby endorsed Clinton early on in the primary; Philips caucused for her in Iowa.

Philips rejected the idea that the race was anything but a choice between people with nearly identical progressive credentials.

“I find it discouraging when experience is considered a negative mark against a person. He’s a progressive fighter,” she said.

Indeed, Perez has elicited widespread progressive praise for expanding overtime pay for workers, improving police accountability, and fighting for immigrant rights, among other accomplishments. He has a stellar liberal record. His detractors mainly point to his support for the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and an unwillingness to prosecute bankers while running the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. 

Given his similarity to Ellison on policy, however, some analysts have argued that party officials should pick the Minnesota congressman to ensure the progressive activists excited about his candidacy ― and Sanders’ bid before that ― remain active in the party, rather than taking their enthusiasm elsewhere. And several prominent Ellison supporters have lamented the way aides to former President Barack Obama reportedly encouraged Perez to run after Ellison won the blessing of Sanders and establishment leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Some DNC members, however, resent the notion that they should be accommodating Sanders backers on the fence about remaining active in the party. Alabama DNC members Clinton Daughtrey and Janet May, both of whom backed Clinton in the primary, said on Friday that they were undecided on who to pick for DNC chair.

One thing they were sure of was that they would not under any circumstances base their decisions on concerns about people who backed Sanders.

“If I turned on C-Span two years ago and Senator Sanders was there, on the chyron in parentheses would be ‘I-Vt.’ If I turned on C-Span last year, the chyron would say ‘I-Vt.’ If I turned it on today, it would say ‘I-Vt.,’” Daughtrey said. “Thus, I want everybody in the tent. We want as many people engaged as possible in the Democratic Party, but if they do not want to identify as Democrats and build up the Democratic Party, then we’re no better than the cult of personality on the other side.”

“Well said,”May chimed in. “I couldn’t say it any better.” 

DNC members’ most common response to questions about divisions within the party is that resistance to President Donald Trump will inevitably unify the warring factions.

“We have a fight on our hands. It is not between Ellison and Perez,” Philips said.

While DNC members are not interested in letting Ellison backers turn the DNC race into a more victorious version of Sanders’ primary challenge, they are extremely eager to link arms with the grassroots movement that has sprung up to oppose Trump. On Friday afternoon, a panel discussion of nine progressive leaders and political entrepreneurs convened by DNC vice chair candidate Liz Jaff was packed to the brim with DNC voting members begging the panelists for advice on how to tap into, and support, their work

One of the panelists, Winnie Wong, a co-founder of the People for Bernie Sanders collective, who helped write the principles of the Women’s March on Washington in January, is backing Ellison in the DNC chair race.

But bringing grassroots activism under the party umbrella is not simply a matter of offering to collaborate in anti-Trump activities, Wong warned. If the DNC members are to succeed in harnessing the grassroots energy, she said, they cannot ignore the proxy race narrative that the public has developed about the contest for the DNC chairmanship.

“The public opinion is already in place. There is a public opinion that frames one candidate as the establishment candidate and the other candidate as a candidate of the people,” Wong said, referring to Perez and Ellison respectively.

“Are they going to ‘Dem-exit’ [if Ellison loses]? I’m sure some people will,” Wong said of Ellison enthusiasts. “But the majority of people will just ‘Dem-stagnate. And that’s not good.”

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The new movie Logan is just days away from release, and while X-Men fans have known for some time that this will be the last time actor Hugh Jackman plays iconic hero Wolverine on-screen, it turns out this is also the end for Patrick Stewart’s portrayal of Professor X/Charles Xavier. The two actors have been constants in the ongoing X-Men … Continue reading

In October 2009, as the Obama White House felt besieged by what it viewed as advocacy journalism masquerading as “fair and balanced” news coverage, top aides to the president declared a de facto war on Fox News.

On the morning of Oct. 18, David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said that Fox would no longer be treated like other news organizations inside the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. That same morning, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the network was “not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”

What happened next was as important a development as the decision to wage the war itself. Fox News’ competitors rallied to its side, challenging the Obama administration’s claims about the network and then refusing to partake in a round of interviews with an administration official after Fox was excluded.

It was a seminal moment of collective action by the Fourth Estate. And it worked. The White House backed down from its confrontation with Fox and the network’s executives and began charting a course of better understanding.

Eight years later, the White House press corps faces a similar crisis point. The Trump administration on Friday excluded a number of prominent news outlets from a closed-door media “gaggle” that Press Secretary Sean Spicer conducted in lieu of a formal briefing. The barring of reporters followed weeks of unending broadsides that the president and his top aides have leveled against the press writ large and against certain television networks specifically, in which they’ve gone so far as to declare the media the “opposition party” and the “enemy of the American people.”

The Associated Press and Time magazine boycotted Friday’s gaggle, while The Wall Street Journal said it would not go again under similar conditions. And one of Fox News’ most prominent anchors, Bret Baier, expressed solidarity with the excluded, echoing the sentiments of other anchors at his network who have criticized the Trump administration’s most recent anti-press rhetoric.

But not everyone at Fox News has shown a willingness to stand alongside the rest of the press corps as was done in 2009. Some at the network, in fact, have appeared to cheer Trump on.

Prime-time host Bill O’Reilly suggested last week that the Obama White House’s attacks on his network in 2009 were unwarranted while Trump’s critique has merit. “It’s harder to run the country because these dishonest people are undermining the whole process,” O’Reilly said. “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy referred to the media as “the opposition party” on Monday morning, a phrase popularized by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. That night, host Sean Hannity told viewers the media had “declared war on President Trump and, by the way, in turn, you the American people who put him in office.” 

And they don’t seem to be the only ones in the press sympathetic to Trump as he blasts their colleagues. The White House press corps now features pro-Trump blogs that seem perfectly happy to side against the press corps. 

Gateway Pundit has talked about “trolling” the media along with covering the administration. And Breitbart News, a far-right, nationalist site that frequently targets the news media, has become a major player under this administration, with Bannon, its former chairman, in such a prominent role. Perhaps not surprisingly, Breitbart was invited into Spicer’s closed-door session, along with The Washington Times and One America News Network, two other conservative outlets whose stock has risen under the new administration and who recently have been called on first at briefings.

All of this has left the press corps in a precarious position at a critical juncture. With Trump’s White House threatening access, it’s unclear whether the Fourth Estate will be able to muster the collective response that proved so effective in 2009.

Back then, the Obama administration was lobbing similar, though hardly as incendiary, criticisms about the coverage it was receiving, from Fox News specifically. The network’s excessive promotion of conservative tea party protests in spring 2009, along with its perspective on administration policies, signaled to the president’s aides that it was approaching the administration in an overtly hostile manner.

“I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” Obama said in June 2009. “That’s a pretty big megaphone. And you’d be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.”

What drove the Obama White House to try to marginalize Fox News wasn’t simply that the network leaned right, however. It was that the stories being promoted, such as the antics of the fringe New Black Panther Party, alleged corruption involving community organizing group ACORN and past radical statements from then-White House official Van Jones, were gaining traction in the national media.

“There was a pipeline of stories coming from Fox News and then making it in the mainstream media outlets like the Post and the Times,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Obama adviser, recalled earlier this week. These stories, he said, were being treated as if “they were coming from other mainstream media outlets and given the journalistic scrutiny that would come in a story in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, when they weren’t.”

What frustrated Obama officials even more was that Fox was promoting these stories during hours traditionally devoted to the day’s news. And at 5 p.m., on a daily basis, host Glenn Beck would amplify them further through his apocalyptic, yet entertaining, weaving of conspiracy theories. Beck would lay out his theories like a madman with a chalkboard. But he had an impact. He has been credited with prompting the Sept. 6, 2009, resignation of Jones after highlighting the past views and affiliations of the little-known environmental adviser.

While the White House never tried barring Fox News from the briefing room, it declined invitations for Obama to appear on “Fox News Sunday” as he made the Sunday talk-show rounds in September 2009. “They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington,” host Chris Wallace said in response.

Later that month, Obama adviser Axelrod met privately at Washington’s Palm steakhouse with Roger Ailes, the famed Republican political operative and then chairman of Fox News, to try to hammer out the differences. But the fight escalated.  

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, told The New York Times on Oct. 11.

A week later, Axelrod and Emanuel reinforced the anti-Fox message on the Sunday shows, and Obama reportedly vented privately about the network the following day to opinionated competitors in one of his off-the-record gatherings with newspaper columnists and commentators such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

The press pushed back. On Oct. 20, Jake Tapper, then a White House correspondent for ABC News, asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs during a morning gaggle to “explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one.” After a tense back-and-forth, Gibbs said it was simply the White House’s “opinion” that Fox News wasn’t a news organization.

“I spoke up against it to the Obama staff both in front of others and behind the scenes, and on air when the State Department and Justice Department targeted James Rosen, because no government should get to say what is or isn’t legitimate or to discredit those doing their jobs responsibly ― that’s a way to undermine oversight,” Tapper recalled in an email to The Huffington Post. 

Two days later, bureau chiefs from the major networks pushed back against the treatment of Fox News by declining to participate in collective coverage of a Treasury Department briefing with executive-pay czar Ken Feinberg. The administration eventually backed down, letting Fox News into the pool and giving the network a win it would tout on air.

“What happened today, I think, was extremely important,” Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer said on the evening of Oct. 22. “In trying to ostracize and demonize Fox, the administration needs complicity from other news organizations. Otherwise it won’t work. What happened today was other news organizations admirably, and on principle, standing up and saying, ‘No, if you are not going to include Fox, we’re not going to go.’ And that solidarity, I think, is important.”

The following day, Gibbs called a top Fox News executive to set up a truce, according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes and his creation and stewardship of Fox News. And after a week or so, the war with Fox News simmered down and the relationship eventually returned to the status quo.

Looking back, Axelrod told HuffPost that he didn’t think the war on Fox News “was a particularly successful tactic.” Though the administration’s complaints may have been “justifiable,” he said, “declaring war on a network ― or in Trump’s case, all but one ― is not an effective tactic.”

“Most responsible journalists recognize the danger when one organization, even Fox News, is out on a ‘list,’” he added.

But other Obama veterans, including Pfeiffer, felt the Obama White House “had some success” in its mission of adding scrutiny to Fox’s coverage. “We were far from perfect. It didn’t solve all the problems. We felt enough progress made.”

That the press corps responded the way it did wasn’t a surprise, Pfeiffer added. Back then, the media was operating under the same general customs and traditions that had been in place for decades. But now, Pfeiffer said, it is a “different era,” one more ripe for exploitation by a White House. Trump, he noted, can broadcast his own unfiltered messages through social media or choose from a growing stable of friendly outlets if mainstream news outlets boycott an event.

“Theoretically, there’s a world where they could say, ‘None of us are going to cover if you don’t do this,’” he said. “But they won’t do that because the Trump folks could just live-stream it on Facebook or Fox will carry it or Breitbart.”

As for reporters covering the administration, it means less leverage to combat the same basic problems. Eight years after he went to bat for Fox News as it was blacklisted from the White House, Tapper finds himself in their shoes. One of the most aggressive journalists covering the Trump administration, he and CNN have been singled out for ridicule and frozen out in general. The administration did not include the network in Friday’s briefing, and it has declined to book key officials on Tapper’s Sunday show.

It’s an echo of 2009, Tapper noted.

“I wouldn’t say the efforts to delegitimize are exactly the same, but the principle (or lack thereof) is: Discredit an entire … credentialed organization (or multiple organizations, in President Trump’s case) based on a facet of the outlet’s coverage that he doesn’t like,” he said.

It remains to be seen if it ends the same. 

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