Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia) - Content

Content

Al Watan provides extensive but uncritical coverage of local news in addition to the usual positive reporting on the activities of the ruling family and the government.

An extraordinary article was published by Bandar bin Sultan, then-Saudi ambassador to Washington, in Al Watan, on 1 June 2004. Prince Bandar regarded the efforts of the Saudi security forces against terrorism as ‘feeble’, and declared that terrorism "has nothing to do with America or Israel or the Christians or Jews . . . So let us stop these meaningless justifications for what those criminals are doing and let stop blaming others while the problem comes from within us’. He also pointed out that the Kingdom’s religious scholars ‘have to declare jihad against those deviants and to fully support it, as those who keep silent about the truth are mute devils". He further argued that religious fighters operating inside the kingdom should be “vanquished” the way “King Abdul Aziz did at the Battle of Al Sabla .”

Majed Garoub, the head of the Jeddah lawyers’ committee, in three articles published in Al Watan in the period of May–June 2010, called for the adoption of certain measures against domestic violence.

On 8 June 2010, Al Watan published a story about the religious police entering a woman’s flat after midnight in the Fahd neighbourhood of Najran without apparent cause two days earlier. Nearly two weeks later, on 21 June 2010, the commission issued an apology, again published in Al Watan, stating “we express our apology about the unintentional inconvenience and injury this matter has caused, and we apologize to all regarding what our brothers, the members of the commission, have rushed into.”.