Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Israel/Gaza Edition
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There's also an information war going on, and both sides want to win it by sharing whatever is confirming their own narrative. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, a guide to sifting fact from fiction about the Israel-Hamas conflict, like how to spot fake posts. Very often it's just typed out with no link, no article name, just below it. It might say BBC World or something like that, but not a link to the source. Also on the show, a month ago, Israel and Saudi Arabia were in talks to, quote, normalize their relations. The

Then the war began. The idea of Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel has gone from unimaginable to about to happen to unimaginable again. Kingdoms roll in the current Middle East crisis and more. It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Many researchers have noted, I'll just summarize, that the maelstrom of mis- and disinformation circling the sliver of land comprising Israel and Gaza is the most fetid case of garbage in, garbage out since the invention of social media. And why wouldn't it be?

Of course, it's not just social media. Plenty of legacy news outlets also rush to judgment on too little information.

So that said, this week we respond to listeners who've told us they're waiting for another OTM Breaking News Consumer's Handbook.

Actually, we've made a couple dozen of them. They're really just a single printable page of red flags and warning signs, guides to what to expect and what to watch out for in the coverage of a particular breaking story. For instance, we have one for mass shootings, one for pandemics, for plane crashes and coups, just to name a few. We make them whenever the longing for information outpaces the availability of actual facts. And they all live on our website, onthemedia.org.

And now, our Breaking News Consumers Handbook, Israel and Gaza edition. We begin with number one, the hearty perennial of breaking news advice. When perusing headlines about a war, don't swallow without chewing. The early versions of our coverage, the headline and the news alert, ended up attributing our description of what happened at the hospital to a Hamas government official who

And the information that that government official passed along turned out to be

That's New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, representing one of many major news outlets who failed to contextualize an unreliable source offering comment within minutes of an explosion at Gaza's Al-Akhli Hospital. That early version, with the benefit of hindsight, was not as good or as accurate or verified as it could have been. Conflicting video evidence is still being parsed, and the prime evidence,

Fragments of the munitions responsible cannot be examined because, says a senior Hamas official, the missile has dissolved like salt in the water, something that bomb and shell fragments definitely are not known to do. On to point number two. Be aware of the biggest spreaders of bad information about this conflict.

That's not so hard. We know who they are. Seven accounts. And for those top seven accounts, we saw over that three-day period, they accumulated 1.6 billion views across a total of 1,834 tweets. Mike Caulfield is a research scientist leading the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public.

His team analyzed the accounts on X that were getting the most views in the first three days after October 7th. Then they looked at popular news sources like BBC World, CNN Breaking News, and found that... Over the first three days of this crisis, we found that the seven accounts had 1.6 billion views. The highly subscribed traditional news accounts...

had 112 million views. Note that these non-traditional accounts usually don't link to the source of their information. And if they do have a citation... Very often it's just typed out with no link, no article name just below it. It might say BBC World or something like that, but not a link to the source. Another common characteristic?

Most of these sites post a lot. Hundreds of times a day, very quick, granular posts. So text posts very often with an image or with a video is decontextualized media, decontextualized rumor, and just kind of coming to people in the stream. Most of these sites are very emotionally charged.

It's high intensity one way or another, either the newness or the nature of what you're watching, which might be about violence. It might have a culture war angle. And the thing that we found was the experience of going through it is very disorienting because you're just seeing intense video and hearing intense rumor one after another. And you're never getting to any deeper depth.

They use the language of journalists posting breaking news. You might get a police siren or all caps breaking, that sort of thing. But these accounts are not affiliated with any news outlets, which is partly what endears them to exes owner Elon Musk, who has actively promoted some of them. One of the top accounts has been Facebook.

repeatedly promoted by Musk as an example of the sort of what he calls citizen journalism he wants to see. One of those seven accounts is at war monitors known for misinformation and anti-Semitism, including using the word Jew as a slur, as in, quote, mind your own business, Jew.

The other, at ScentDefender, is notorious for fake news and has been called by a researcher at the Atlantic Defense Digital Forensics Research Lab a, quote, absolutely poisonous account. So that's two of the big seven, massively trafficking and BS. You can find them all at U. Washington's Center for an Informed Public.

Meanwhile, many of the worst sites love to pass themselves off as real open source researchers, when in fact they're merely grabbing stuff from platforms like Telegram. More on that later. Real open source intelligence, or OSINT researchers, stay up nights tracking images back to the source, scrutinizing landmarks and the angle of the light.

Eric Toller is one of those, a reporter at the visual investigations team at the New York Times. He says that in this conflict, he's seeing a lot of the bad stuff he's seen before. The classic things you see in every conflict, right? So you find old misattributed videos, you know, something from Syria or Afghanistan or Yemen they repackage, or from Palestine that is just old that they repackage and reshare. That's kind of par for the course. This happens in every conflict. But he's noticed one change.

In recent conflicts, like the Russia-Ukraine war, Twitter is no longer a driver of new information. It's just another aggregator. Similar to what Facebook and Reddit and some other platforms became from other conflicts. Which brings us to our third point. Know your platforms. You want to be where the action is? In this conflict, it's not Twitter or X.

It's Instagram. Instagram is used more heavily in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and so on than some other platforms. But Telegram has been really important. Telegram is a messaging app that also has channels. Anyone can create a channel and broadcast messages to whoever subscribes. And it has other advantages in a war zone. It doesn't take a lot of bandwidth. It doesn't take nearly as much battery as some other platforms, especially where the power situation is so precarious in the Gaza Strip.

It's lightweight. It's easy to use. You don't have to have the newest iPhone 15 whatever whatever to use it. And at least in the first couple of weeks of this particular conflict, Telegram was almost entirely unregulated. That's where Hamas was posting because it was banned from the major platforms.

Telegram may not be that popular in some parts of the West, but in some other parts of Europe and some parts of Asia, it's really, really popular. It has like half a billion users. Shayan Siddharthadeh is a journalist at BBC Monitoring and BBC Verify. So Hamas usually shares their content on Telegram, and then those videos, those images, they

then are reposted onto other major platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook. Earlier this week, the app started restricting access to several Hamas-run channels, but by then, some of the accounts had grown to hundreds of thousands of followers. And Hamas's social media, like the other parties involved in this conflict right now, is currently in very high gear.

Sardar Sadegh works day in, day out to verify or debunk the information shared on all these platforms. He says he sorts myths and disinformation into three big buckets. One is the obvious one, which is everyone knows in the 21st century, wars are fought both online and offline. It's not just the artillery shells and airstrikes.

There's also an information war going on and both sides want to win it by sharing whatever is confirming their own narratives. So the first bucket has the stuff generated by those actively engaged in the information war. The second bucket of bad info is filled by what he calls engagement farmers.

hundreds of millions of people are going online to find out what is happening on a daily basis, this is a great opportunity for you to just share anything that is shocking, enraging, outrageous, regardless of whether it's true or not. As long as it gets you engagement, not only do you raise your profile, but also in some cases you can make money. So what is the third bucket?

The third pocket is what I would call proper disinformation. People who are exploiting this conflict in order to share their political narratives. I'll give you an example.

In the first week of the conflict, we had a video go viral online, which appeared to be a BBC News video. It was a completely fake video, and it claimed that the BBC was reporting that the weapons that Hamas used in order to attack Israel on the 7th of October had come from Ukraine. There's no evidence for it.

But then you have to wonder why someone would go through that much effort to try and tie the Ukrainian government or the conflict in Ukraine to what's going in the Middle East right now.

So then what do you come up with, Russia? I don't have evidence for who might have produced it. All I can say is that after that video went viral, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made the exact same claim on one of his social media accounts. So again, you know, somebody clearly is benefiting politically from spreading the idea that Hamas is using weapons given to Ukraine by Western governments.

We've spoken with a researcher from the University of Washington about a few key Twitter X accounts that have been very influential, also very unreliable in spreading information about the conflict, which points to the degradation of X as a source for breaking news. That's a good point because X is the platform where most journalists are. But people forget that the size of users that X has is not in any way comparable to, say, Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube.

Now, in the case of TikTok, the number of false or misleading videos that I've seen go viral is mind-boggling. And I'm not talking about videos that have 2,000 views, 3,000 views. I don't care about that. I'm talking about videos that have 5 million views, 10 million views, 20 million views. And you look at the video and you find out it's not even from the Syrian war or the Israel-Hamas war in 2021, at least. It's video game footage.

One really egregious example of it that I saw was a few days ago, somebody was pretending to be a live streamer who was a freelance reporter on the ground in Israel reporting the latest incidents that are happening, live streaming it. Three million people were watching it. I checked the video that was being live streamed allegedly from the ground in Israel. It was a military exercise that you could find on YouTube from 2017.

So Siddhartha scales mountains of deception. But he says that one kind of story frequently called a lie isn't a lie. His research has found that when someone claims that images of victims or casualties of war are faked or staged by crisis actors, that's almost always a lie.

Mark, that is point four in our Breaking News Consumers Handbook. One example is there was in the first week of the conflict, there was a video of a child in a hospital wrapped in a shroud. The child was dead and somebody who seemed to be a relative was hugging that child in distress. And that video went viral and it was shared by official accounts linked to the Israeli government claiming that child was a doll.

We went and checked it. It turned out that was a real child that had died and had gone through rigor mortis. They had been in the hospital morgue for hours and hours and hours. Another example that I saw two days ago, viral on Instagram, was heavily edited footage of two or three separate videos. They were Israeli teenagers crying, recounting the story of how their parents were killed during the Hamas attack in one of the kibbutz in Israel.

This got millions of views, both on Instagram and on X. It claimed that these teenagers were crisis actors. They had been hired...

And he claimed that you could clearly see in one of the videos that one of the teenagers starts laughing because the director gives them something or they're embarrassed by their acting. I went back and checked that. The videos that have been put together and deceptively edited were from genuine interviews by CNN and ABC News with these three teenagers. They're Israeli-Americans, by the way, and they genuinely reside in the kibbutz in southern Israel. And their parents were actually both killed, shot dead on that day.

You've been posting social media threads with tips and tricks for verifying information about the conflict. You created a fake BBC tweet. You showed how it was done. You showed how you could identify a fake tweet.

One of the textbook ways people mislead on the internet is they claim to have taken a screenshot of a genuine post and then they share it on another platform without linking to the actual post. So you can't go to the actual thing. You're only looking at a picture. Yes.

One rule for a listener might be, be very suspicious if you can't link to the original tweet. 100%. That's point five. Check the attribution and be careful of the source you're pulling from. And learn about some of the basic verification tools at your disposal. Apparently, it's easier than you may think. I

I asked Sardar Zadeh, can you give me an example that people can go to of how you used readily available tools to verify a picture? Yeah, of course. It was a picture of two children and a convoy of tanks with Ukrainian flags on them. And this was two days after the outset of the war in Ukraine, February 2022.

This image went really viral. I remember European politicians, US politicians, influencers shared it because it was a touching moment. The way I checked that one was I used a tool which is called Google Lens. And it allows you to crop a social media post, in this case, the image that I want in that post, and then go through the archive of pages that Google has and see the first use of that particular image on Google.

After searching for a while, I was able to find one example from Flickr from 2016 with that image shared by the official account of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry in 2016. So although that was a picture of two children seeing off a convoy of tanks of Ukrainian troops, it had nothing to do with that particular moment in time.

Now, is Google Lens easily accessible? Anybody can go to it. Just type in images.google.com in your web browser, whatever browser you're using, and you will see in the search box what appears to be a camera logo. You click on that camera logo and all you have to do

If it's a link with a social media post with an image, you just copy paste that link into the search box and then it will do the job for you. All you have to do is just go through the results that it brings up for you. The most important thing is try to find examples from authoritative sources, news organizations,

People who you can trust, at least to some extent. And then you want to find the earliest example of its use. Okay, this, save with the image that we just spoke about. If you find the image shared on the internet in 2020, you already know something is wrong there. That image cannot have appeared on 2020 and also 2022 at the same time. Right. But if like me, you want to find the full context about it, you have to spend a bit more time, go through the results. And I found the actual original use from 2016. Okay.

And he's very keen on a plugin called InVID, because it enables you to make simultaneous use of a bunch of different verification tools, like Yandex or TinEye, each of which has particular strengths.

But that's for the next class. I'm sticking to Verification 101 today. Still, it's all there, ready for you. All you have to do is be on the Chrome browser and install the InVID Chrome extension. And you will find how much easier verifying images on the internet will become. So it's not just for experts anymore. Hopefully not. And it shouldn't be, you know.

This is something that in this day and age in the 21st century, this is necessary knowledge for everybody. Cheyenne Sardarzadeh is a journalist at BBC Verify. You can find his X-Feed at Cheyenne S-H-A-Y-A-N 86 for tips and tricks on how to interpret what you see online. You need some level of media literacy to navigate these muddy waters.

But it also takes time. It takes commitment. And that's point six.

Eric Toller of The New York Times described what it took his team to put out an investigation earlier this week that showed that a piece of video evidence U.S. and Israeli officials were using related to the hospital explosion was not what they believed it to be. These videos don't have timestamps on them, right? You have to watch hours and hours to find, like, the right sequence of a flash here, a flash there, a missile goes up here, and like, oh, wait, those are the same, or, oh, the clouds match up, right? It's very labor-intensive work.

Of course, they're doing granular OSINT work, not just basic image verification. We looked at this data, we looked at these videos, you can look at them here. This is how things line up on a satellite map, which you can look at the same as us. And if you don't trust us, you don't believe us, then that's fine. We've given you what we got. We've shown our work.

But even so, sometimes the experts get it wrong. Even if you go through all the same tools and you kind of do the labor and you get on the satellite maps and match up imagery and all that stuff, even then sometimes you don't get to the answer. It's not easy. I mean, you see like kind of the seasoned accounts, right, who've been doing this stuff for years and years and years who get fooled by some photos and videos that come out. Point seven is less a directive than a suggestion. That goes back to our very first handbook.

Think before you repost. Some of this is on you. What you do matters. It's so easy to further pollute the toxic stew that is our media ecosystem with a casual retweet of bad but affirming information. So take a moment, look for the source, check and see if it's an easy-to-fake screenshot, any of the stuff we talked about.

Or if that's too time-consuming, and it may well be, maybe just don't click? This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?

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No te preocupes. Next time. A friend canceling plans is actually music to my ears, and it's all thanks to IKEA. I've been to las discotecas, and I've socialized a lot. But now, nothing is more exciting than getting a good night's sleep. I've got IKEA blackout curtains, a comfy comforter from IKEA, dimmable lamps, and a mattress that feels like sleeping on a cloud. From, adivinaste, IKEA. Visit your nearest IKEA today and find everything you need para crear el cuarto de tus sueños.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. On September 22nd, about two weeks before the war between Hamas and Israel began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the United Nations and outlined his plan for the region. The blessing of a new Middle East between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and our other neighbors.

We see him holding a thick red marker, one of his favorite bits of stagecraft, which he squeakily drags across the map of the region, from the United Arab Emirates in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. We will not only bring down...

This rosy pitch is what diplomats had been referring to as normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

A deal brokered by the U.S. that could unlock new trade agreements, establish new embassies, and see Saudi Arabia formally recognize Israel as a nation for the first time.

But, and this is Netanyahu's framing, there was one thing standing in his way. We must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states. The Palestinians could greatly benefit from a broader peace. They should be part of that process, but they should not have a veto over the process. The normalization process has been cited by American officials as a trigger for the attacks on October 7th. I'm convinced...

One of the reasons Samas attacked when they did, and I have no proof of this, it's just my instinct tells me. President Joe Biden in a Rose Garden speech this week. It's because of the progress we were making towards regional integration for Israel. Saudi Arabian leaders now say they stand with the Palestinian people, and all parties appear to have paused normalization talks indefinitely. The idea of Saudi Arabia recognizing Israel has gone from unimaginable to...

Justin Scheck is a reporter at the New York Times and co-author of the book Blood and Oil, Mohammed bin Salman's ruthless quest for global power. For much of the Islamic world and for many people in Saudi Arabia and in the Saudi royal family, including the current king, King Salman,

the Palestinian cause was one of the number one priorities they had politically and religiously for decades.

And Mohammed bin Salman, the king's son, has sort of turned that in his head. Sheck says bin Salman had been willing to negotiate with Israel partly for access to Israeli security and military technology and partly for geopolitical alignment with anti-Iran countries. But he was in a bind. Israel hasn't given an inch in terms of any kind of meaningfully better situation for the Palestinians.

So, in the midst of an unfolding war with uncertainty as to how much or how little the wider region will become embroiled, we wanted to take a step back and focus on the role of the Saudi Kingdom.

In the profile of Mohammed bin Salman in his book, Justin Scheck describes the crown prince's aha moment. What Mohammed bin Salman realized as he gained experience within the royal court is that Saudi Arabia, for the entirety of the country's history, has had the structure where the royal family gains its legitimacy from the religious establishment.

what we would call the Wahhabist strain. These clerics believe in this very, very conservative interpretation of Islam where men and women need to be separate. So you have this kingdom where there was no live music. They banned movie theaters. A man and a woman who were not related couldn't go out in public together. But what Mohammed bin Salman realized was that Saudi Arabia's population has grown tremendously. Over half the country is under 30 years old.

the country has some of the highest levels of smartphone saturation in the world. Just to say, they're extremely online. And what they see when they're extremely online is that people of their age and level of wealth in all these other wealthy countries can go to the movies, they can go to concerts, they can go to dates, they can dance. So they see these social freedoms and

Now, that alignment between the royal family and the religious establishment is no longer what gives the royal family legitimacy. It makes the royal family resent it. Mohammed bin Salman realized you can't rule 30 million people if they all dislike you. He realized that in order to get buy-in, he was going to have to get legitimacy from the country's younger population and not from the religious people anymore who made life no fun for those younger people.

I mean, he was in his mid-20s during the Arab Spring. And so he could relate to and see that the internet and social media were these extraordinarily powerful tools for political upheaval. And it seems like he came to respect and even fear these tools. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, absolutely. And one broad way to understand some of the big forces in Saudi politics over the decades is to look at these two major periods of revolution in the region. And one was in 1979, when you had the Iranian revolution and this conservative takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in Saudi Arabia by very conservative Muslims, you saw...

What could happen when extremist religious groups feel that their leaders are indulgent and not religious and can form that kind of uprising? You mean like the modern day rumors of Saudi princes getting wasted in Europe and like hanging out with sex workers and that kind of thing? Yeah.

Yeah, all of the cliches of the Saudi royal family being profligate and spending too much money. And the Saudi royal family said, oh, you know, this is something we need to deal with. And Saudi Arabia became a more restrictive, more conservative country. And now move forward, the Arab Spring, you get a different spring where you have these populations of young people who feel their rulers aren't legitimate, not because of their profligacy or sinful lives, but because of lack of freedom.

And Mohammed bin Salman, as you said, he saw the Arab Spring. And to him, it was an urgent issue to make Saudi Arabia into a place where younger people would want to be. He was also fixated on how people outside of Saudi Arabia felt. As he gained power, he hired international polling companies to survey people about their perceptions of Saudi Arabia.

What he found wasn't that surprising. What the polling found was that people in the West thought of Saudi Arabia as a place that was restrictive, that had a connection to terrorism, that separated men and women, that didn't have entertainment for its people. It was seen as a place that nobody would want to visit and nobody would want to live in.

He set out to reform the country culturally and financially, addressing some of these negative perceptions of the country for the world at large and for this burgeoning youth population. And his character as a leader is somewhat hard to grasp because he's seen as liberal in some ways, at least compared to the country's ultra-conservative past, but

But he's also a despot with a horrifying list of human rights abuses. In one of the biggest mass executions in decades, Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on Saturday, which included seven Yemenis and one Syrian. His government has jailed female activists, for instance, for fighting for a woman's right to drive.

Even as, you know, secretly MBS had softened on that idea and was willing to lift some restrictions for women. So how do we make sense of his actions and the way that he has treated people advocating for some of the same beliefs?

Mohammed bin Salman has really liberalized Saudi Arabia socially. It's a place where your day-to-day life is much freer now. Like, there are no longer these bearded men going around reprimanding or arresting women whose ankles show. You can go and get coffee with a member of the opposite sex. Women can drive, all that. But in his vision for the country, social freedom and political freedom have nothing to do with each other.

So the idea that you can have social freedom means that you will get these freedoms that flow from the leader. They flow from him and his father. They don't flow from people protesting and demanding things. On the political side, any

He's made Saudi Arabia a place that is perhaps less politically free. I hesitate a little bit because it's an absolute monarchy. There's never been political freedom. People have no say in their own rule by definition. But in the past, there was more wiggle room to criticize. You could be sort of

loyal opposition. You could come out and say you didn't like certain things. And now you can't criticize him. And part of it is he realizes the power of social media and knows that one person with an offhanded remark on Twitter can go viral. And then he's got millions of people seeing criticism of him. He was so afraid of one person's ability to write a tweet that he ended up a

Effectively helping develop a spy within Twitter in San Francisco to root out this very problem. Two spies. I thought there were two. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. They infiltrated Twitter to help unmask the identities of royal court critics on Twitter. Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi earned a reputation as like a giant thorn in the side of the royal family. And according to the CIA, Crown Prince MBS personally ordered that Khashoggi be killed. So it's been five years now since he was dismembered by Saudi operatives at the consulate in Istanbul.

How did the public knowledge of that killing affect Saudi politics thereafter? He came from a family that had been closely tied to the Saudi royal family for decades.

a couple of generations, and he was of their milieu. He was someone who sometimes he worked for the royal court, sometimes he worked for media organizations. In the eyes of Mohammed bin Salman, he was seen not so much as a journalist criticizing him, but as his own guy who had betrayed him. Unlike, for example, the bombing of Yemen, which Saudi Arabia has been doing for years at this point with many

dead civilians to show for it. This single act around Jamal Khashoggi really resonates internationally. It's something that's so beyond the pale that immediately there are calls for the U.S. to sanction Saudi Arabia or for the U.S. to pressure King Salman to remove Mohammed bin Salman from the line of succession. Have we meaningfully sanctioned Saudi Arabia since then? No, there were not meaningful sanctions put in place. And I think...

when you're dealing with a monarchy, you can't ask them to change the line of succession. But what they learned with Muhammad is that he's not someone who responds to pressure. And the more publicly people or governments try to get him to do what they want, the more publicly he pushes back. And so from a practical perspective,

If Saudi Arabia is going to be the U.S.'s ally, it kind of has to deal with the guy it has. And I think also there's something problematic about saying, like, we'll basically support you bombing, like, children in Yemen. Like, that can go on for seven years. But this one guy, that's it. And we'll sell you weapons to do the bombing of children in Yemen. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So once you're in bed with these people...

other than crawling out of bed with them, it's hard to see like a coherent framework within which to deal with them. It's sort of like you kind of take each thing as it comes along and hope it blows away eventually.

Which is what's happened with Khashoggi. It's no longer something that Mohammed bin Salman is considered a pariah for, evidently. Khashoggi's death has been largely ignored by American officials, but not forgotten. Washington insiders are now grimly joking that MBS stands for Mr. Bonesaw.

Coming up, Mohammed bin Salman's effort to change the Saudi narrative abroad, please a young and restless populace at home, and diversify an oil-based economy helps explain why his country has poured money into a dizzying number of sports. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. Before the break, I was talking to Justin Scheck about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's efforts to change Saudi Arabia from the inside out.

To that end, Bin Salman has been buying up a whole lot of sports. Saudi Arabia have confirmed that they will be bidding to host the World Cup in 2034. Saudi Arabia has investments of upwards of $500 billion. We're talking about soccer clubs, Formula One races, the WWE. The WWE, who you may remember signed a 10-year deal to stage events there.

and who in April staged the greatest royal rumble in Jeddah, which was wall-to-wall propaganda for the Saudi government. It's hot here in Jeddah, but tonight it's going to get hotter and hotter and hotter. We got a whole lot of action going down here. Many critics are looking at this and saying, well, quite simply, Saudi Arabia have bought the game of golf.

The golf thing originated with a guy named Yasser Al-Rahman, who was Mohammed bin Salman's banker. He had this deep passion for golf. And so when Mohammed became crown prince, he appointed Yasser Al-Rahman to be the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. It's called the public investment fund. People call it PIF sometimes. And it's this giant fund that invests money for the Saudi government all over the place.

And he was able to convince Mohammed bin Salman that,

investing in golf was the kind of thing that could help Saudi Arabia become a place that the world sees as coming out to meet it. In 2021, Yasser Al-Rumain founded Live Golf, a new entity that would compete with the PGA Tour, which until that point essentially had a monopoly in the sport. Live began poaching big names like Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, and Phil Mickelson by promising them giant payouts.

Then the PGA fired back. You could say it was the shot heard around the world of golf today. The PGA Tour effectively sliced 17 players from its roster over their participation in a Saudi-financed golf tournament. In turn, some of the banned golfers sued the PGA. Liv joined the lawsuit, which stretched on for the better part of a year. There was legal wrangling back and forth, and eventually the PGA caved.

and agreed to merge because I think they felt like they just didn't have the money to compete both for players and paying players, but also to have a protracted legal dispute with a country that is sitting on top of one of the world's biggest reservoirs of oil. Like Saudi Arabia pumps money and the PGA doesn't. To be clear, the merger may not go through. But I was curious to know how people within Saudi Arabia were reacting to bin Salman's golf shopping spree.

So I called up this guy. It's barely registered in Saudi media. Ahmed Al Omran is a freelance reporter based in Saudi Arabia. He's worked with NPR, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. Like it was not covered that much. It was not debated that much on local social media.

It only merited a mention on page five in a Saudi local daily. Saudis, he says, by and large, don't really care about golf. Their hearts are with another game. Football or soccer is the biggest sports in the country and it has a

the attention of a lot of people, especially young people. Remember, this is a very young country where the majority of the population, around 60%, are under the age of 30. And football is their favorite sports and their favorite pastime.

In December, Mohammed bin Salman's public investment fund began injecting its National Soccer League with serious money and serious star power. It's official. Cristiano Ronaldo is taking his talents to Saudi Arabia and the man is going to get paid to do it. More than $200 million a season. That's right, $200 million.

Roughly the annual playing wages of LeBron James, Steph Curry, Aaron Judge, and Patrick Mahomes combined. When it started last January with the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo to Anosu, there was a lot of curiosity and questions about what does it all mean? Is this a one-off? Should we expect more of this? But then over the summer, we saw the kind of continuation of this Saudi sports project with

all these other big names arrive in. It's been the summer of Saudi football transfers. Players like Roberto Firmino, Edouard Mendy and Riyad Mahrez have all joined Al-Ali. This idea of trying to change Saudi's image through sports has led many in the Western media to use this term sports washing. It's like it's kind of everywhere. How do you feel about that term?

This idea that huge spending would somehow cause a positive image of the country is not automatic. And if anything, they say it's been the opposite, that these investments did not lead to a better or more positive coverage of Saudi Arabia. It has led to more scrutiny of Saudi Arabia and its records.

Yeah.

We have to be careful about how we talk about this because some of what it appears to suggest that this thing is being done as some sort of distraction. Let's get people to watch these football stars in the flesh from a close distance. And somehow that would help you stave off frustration or people wanting what's outside.

And I think more fundamentally, it's about the economy and how the economy does. Because let's face it, if these young people...

cannot find jobs, then they won't be able to afford the tickets to go watch these football stars in the flesh. In fact, the Crown Prince said something similar in response to a question from Fox News' Brett Baier when they spoke last month. What do you say to the people who charge that that's part of sports washing, that you're trying to use all of that to somehow improve or

somehow affect your image in the world? Well, if sport washing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then I will continue doing sport washing. You're okay with that term? I don't care. I have 1% growth of GDP from sports, and I'm aiming for another 1.5%. I have no idea what he was talking about with 1%.

I haven't seen the numbers. It's hard for me to imagine that their GDP has increased by 1% because they own a golf league now and they bought a bunch of soccer players. But, you know, my co-author Bradley Hope and I, we both have this like, we've talked about this, we like bristle when people say sports washing. Why? Not because it's offensive, but because it assumes that Saudi Arabia is really this one thing, but they're buying sports stuff to pretend like there's something else.

Mohammed bin Salman has been very open that this is a country that is welcoming tourists. It's becoming much more socially free. It is politically extraordinarily restrictive. And

If you're Saudi, you better not criticize me. But if you're foreign and you want to come visit, we would love to have you. What I hear you saying is that he doesn't really care if you still associate Saudi Arabia with the horrible things that his government has done because he knows no matter what, you'll do business with him. Which implies like the big lesson of the last seven or eight years that Saudi Arabia has taught us, which is that if you have enough money, you can do whatever you want.

So the Crown Prince is spending a boatload of money in an attempt to improve both his country's image abroad and his subjects' lives at home.

It remains to be seen if either goal is attainable. But how is his presence affecting the wider region? And what part will Saudi Arabia play in the geopolitical game of chess unfolding around it? Particularly when it comes to its longtime foe, Iran. They have a long history of enmity since 1979 and the Iranian revolution, which turned Iran into an Islamic republic.

with the ostensible goal of being not just the leader of the Shia world, but the Muslim world. And that triggered a bitter rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Beirut-based journalist Kim Gatiss writes for The Atlantic. She's also the author of Black Wave, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the 40-year rivalry that unraveled culture, religion, and collective memory in the Middle East.

This week, Saudi Arabia evacuated the family of its diplomatic staff in Lebanon as fighting between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel intensified. Gatiss believes that Saudi Arabia could play a crucial role in the future of this conflict.

She's observed a pattern in which Saudi Arabia, Iran and the U.S. define themselves in the region in relation to each other. Well, Saudi Arabia has often used the threat of Iran and that it poses to the region to call on the U.S. to remain fully engaged in the Middle East.

And Iran uses America's influence in the Middle East to justify why it needs to remain fully on guard and using proxy militias and continue to support Hamas and Hezbollah and to push back against Iran.

what it describes as the imperial America and its support for Israel. So America ends up in this interesting triangle between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Has the jockeying between Iran and Saudi Arabia for power, with Palestinians caught in the middle, changed at all since Mohammed bin Salman came to power? In a way, yes, because he has sounded very serious about...

normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And so we need to keep in mind that it's possible that the Saudis were very willing to have normalization with the Israelis while providing very little for the Palestinians. I don't think the shopping list was very big or very important when it came to what the Palestinians were going to get out of it.

But now they're offering, in a way, the jackpot for the Israelis, full-on relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. What more could you ask for as Israel? The Saudis now hold a card that previous Saudi rulers didn't have. The Saudis now realize that they need to get quite a bit more for the Palestinians. They need to get something really serious. They need to get a political horizon and

a way towards the end of the occupation of Palestinian territories. When Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7th, Hamas's political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, warned Arab countries that Israel couldn't protect them. How did that message reverberate in Arab nations? Part of it was a message to Arab countries that have been engaged in normalization talks with Israel, like Saudi Arabia.

and countries that have already come to an agreement with Israel through the Abraham Accords, like the United Arab Emirates. And it took me a while to realize that beyond saying that this was an attack that was meant to derail those efforts, it was also a veiled threat. In essence, you might be next, and Israel cannot protect you because look at how weak it is. And you've observed that following the attack,

we saw some communication between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the president of Iran. Why was that significant?

I thought it was very significant. Now, they've had periods of détente between the two of them since 1979, namely in the 90s. But since 2016, the relationship between the two countries has been very tense. They broke off diplomatic relations, and there's been a lot of not only rhetoric, but also proxies of Iran lobbing missiles at Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, the Saudis and the Iranians announced a new rapprochement, helped along...

in the last mile by China. And that came about because tension was rising way too quickly between not just the two of them, but generally in the region. And they both wanted to buy some breathing space.

That rapprochement is tenuous, but has held since then. And so I thought it was very interesting that when the October 7th attack happened, and Ismail Haniyeh says, be clear, this is a warning that Israel can't protect you as Arab countries, that instead of the

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, saying, okay, well, this is the end of the rapprochement because, you know, that was all about keeping the region quiet. And now one of Iran's allies has upset this. No, he takes the call from Ibrahim Raisi, the Iranian president, because on the one hand, the Saudis are thinking smartly, keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. We need to keep this channel open.

But interestingly enough, also the Iranians, I think, were, as far as I can understand from my information, were taken aback by the extent of the operation that Hamas carried out.

And the blowback, which has come at great cost to civilians as well in Gaza, and has brought, you know, U.S. warships to the Mediterranean and President Biden visiting Israel. And I think they don't want a full-on war. And so they were quick also to reach out to the Saudis to pass a message that

to say, we're reasonable, we're here to talk. Normalization is on the back burner now. But what role do you think Saudi Arabia might or could play in helping diffuse the conflict in the shorter term? There's only so much the Saudis can do on their own.

If there are no calls for a ceasefire by the U.S., if the military campaign by the Israelis continues, if there are yet more Palestinian deaths in Gaza, if there is...

Neither a desire by Benjamin Netanyahu to engage in conversations about the long-term future of this region and the concession this requires to the Palestinians, nor a new Israeli government. And there's really not much the Saudis can do on their own.

It requires partners. It requires the U.S. and it requires the Israelis and the Saudis together and other Arab countries, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Emiratis to come together and work intensely together to figure out a path forward and away from the violence. But the Saudis have an opportunity here to deliver a long-term solution

peaceful outcome for this region, but they can't do it on their own. Kim, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. Kim Gattas is the author of Black Wave, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the 40-year rivalry that unraveled culture, religion, and collective memory in the Middle East.

So the horrendous violence in Israel and Gaza is far from the whole story. As we heard, Saudi Arabia's move towards normalization with Israel may have sparked this horror, but it can't end it. Now the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a status quo maintained by periodic spasms of violence, may be subtly shifting.

Not quite the new Middle East Netanyahu promised, but one that could have reverberations clear across the world.

And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Suzanne Gabber, with help from Sean Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone.