How Saudi Podcasts Navigate Political Constraints

Saudi Arabia is not known for its press freedoms—in fact, quite the opposite. This year, the kingdom ranks 162 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom, with a range of formal laws and security-sector oversight tightly regulating print, broadcast, and online outlets. The rise to power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has contributed to these restrictions. One of the most prominent Saudi media figures of recent decades, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered by agents of the Saudi state in October 2018, while critical remarks on social media have landed many Saudis in prison.

Yet Saudi media outlets continue to evolve and expand. Alongside new satellite channels, a nascent film industry, and a host of individual influencers, podcasts have become a rapidly expanding media format in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding Gulf.

These podcasts cover many different topics, including business success stories, human psychology, social change, and true crime. But they also address politics, at least indirectly. These podcasts at times host state officials ranging from minor bureaucrats to some of the most powerful and well-connected individuals in the country. Nor are episodes simply predetermined talking points: Hosts seem to steer their conversations toward topics of public interest and raise uncomfortable questions.

As one example, last year the podcast Soqrat (“Socrates” in Arabic) hosted Khaled Al Shaibani, an official tasked with privatizing aspects of Saudi healthcare and streamlining the rest in a project dubbed the Health Transformation Program. Late in the interview, host Omar Aljeraisy began posing questions from viewers reflecting citizens’ concerns about access to free healthcare—a fundamental right in the country.

In one instance, Aljeraisy framed the question this way: “Now, here’s a question that shouldn’t have to be asked. However, as long as it comes up, it deserves to be answered. Will free treatment continue?” (author’s translation). In response, Shaibani equivocated. “We want a definitive answer to this,” Aljeraisy insisted, adding that talk of privatization and health insurance clearly “frightened” some citizens, who needed to be assured that no surprise fees were coming down the line. Eventually, Aljeraisy got his guest to agree out loud that citizens “won’t pay a penny—either under the old model [of healthcare] or the new model.” Subsequent questions gave Shaibani a chance to explain how his work fits into MBS’s flagship reform program, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.

Are podcast appearances like this an opportunity for hosts and producers to hold officials to account? Some Saudi media figures have presented their work as supporting dialogue between citizens and the state, confronting officials with pressing questions and uncomfortable realities. Or are these kinds of interviews mere cheerleading for Saudi leaders and the Vision 2030 policy agenda? Soqrat episodes, as well as political science research, suggest the answer lies somewhere in between.

A Brief Introduction to Saudi Podcasting

While Arabic-language podcasts have existed for some time, they have recently exploded in both number and popularity, especially in Saudi Arabia. The most popular podcast in Saudi Arabia, Fnjan (“Coffee Mug”), was one of the first of its kind in the kingdom. The show’s creator and host, Abdulrahman Abumalih, had been toying with the idea of starting a podcast since 2013, and finally got underway in 2015—one of a number of Saudi creative ventures in recent years. Since then, the show has released over 350 episodes on an enormous range of topics: arts and culture, social change, business and technology, and politics and policymaking, among others.

Fnjan now forms part of a wide range of digital content produced by parent company Thmanyah (“Eight”), a Saudi analogue to something like Vox Media. The firm’s fleet of podcasts include shows such as Swalif Business (stories of various entrepreneurs); Alfajr (“The Dawn”; a The Daily–style morning news roundup); and Mortada (“Counterattack,” focused entirely on the Saudi football scene). As early as 2020, Abumalih was being feted by regional legacy outlets as the “podcast king” of Saudi Arabia.

Per Aljeraisy’s telling, Soqrat started out as a set of brief explainers on aspects of Vision 2030 that he began posting to his Snapchat account around 2016. By late 2018, a local outlet (not Thmanyah) approached him about developing a show centered around Saudi Arabia’s so-called national transformation—the show that eventually became the initial run of Soqrat. (The name “Socrates” comes from staff jokes about the number of questions Aljeraisy asks his guests.) Finally, in August 2021, Thmanyah acquired the podcast in what was described at the time as “the largest acquisition deal for a podcast program in the Middle East and North Africa” (author’s translation).

Each Soqrat episode entails a long-form interview with a Saudi state official about their role in achieving Vision 2030, albeit with more recent episodes branching out to cover sports, media, business, and developments in neighboring countries. Aljeraisy guides guests through long, semistructured discussions, with some episodes running more than three hours. Episodes conclude with questions submitted in advance by the show’s followers (as guests are announced on social media prior to recording).

Soqrat garners a respectable audience (see figure 1). From its arrival at Thmanyah until the end of 2024, episodes of the show posted to YouTube garnered around 120,000 views each, comparable to Swalif Business but considerably fewer than the more established Fnjan. (For context, Fnjan currently holds the Guinness World Record for most-watched podcast episode in history.) A few Soqrat episodes have pulled in exceptional numbers, however, typically when the show’s guests are especially prominent media figures or state officials.

The most-viewed Soqrat episode on YouTube, for example, is with Yasir al-Rumayyan, chairman of the powerful Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), and confidant of the crown prince (see table 1). (Rumayyan’s appearance on the podcast made international news because of the discussion of the governance of PIF funds—particularly the extent of MBS’s control over major financial decisions.) By contrast, episodes featuring guests who are less prominent, such as a bureaucrat specializing in the registration of contracting firms, or work for more obscure entities, such as the National Center for Wildlife, tend to attract smaller audiences.

This variation suggests the attraction of Soqrat: More listeners tune in the more they think they’ll hear something interesting about how the country is run. Aljeraisy readily admits that the scale and pace of change in the country makes for good content. “Can you imagine sitting and listening to a government official for an hour and 50 minutes . . . ten years ago? It’s impossible to imagine!” he noted in a 2022 retrospective for the show’s one hundredth episode. Although MBS has never appeared on the show, he hovers at the margins of each conversation. In interviews with more prominent guests, Aljeraisy makes sure to ask what it is like to work alongside the crown prince, drawing out a wide range of anecdotes: complimenting MBS on his political vision, emphasizing his attention to detail, or testifying to his apparent expertise in the game of golf.

The Vision Will Be Podcasted

Media strategies have been an integral part of the Vision 2030 reform program over the past decade. MBS launched the project with a headline-grabbing press conference and an unusual number of lengthy, in-depth interviews with regional and international outlets. Saudi Arabia has funded promotional videos for new ventures, whether tourism destinations or various so-called gigaprojects, that periodically flood social media outlets such as YouTube and Instagram. Western social media influencers have also taken part in promoting Vision 2030 with either acknowledged or alleged ties to Saudi entities; these campaigns sometimes backfire by highlighting shortcomings of these projects or attracting criticism of the influencers themselves.

At home, these efforts have played out across a media landscape that ranges from truly state-owned outlets to those better described as state-regulated.

The Ministry of Media directly owns some outlets, such as the official Umm al-Qura gazette, satellite television network Al-Ekhbariya, and the Saudi Press Agency (whose reports make up the bulk of local newspaper coverage).

Many others are privately owned but closely regulated by the Saudi state through indirect ownership and licensing requirements. A 1964 press law, for example, consolidated a freewheeling landscape of individually owned newspapers into a handful of papers managed by state-licensed press establishments. Private satellite stations Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC, founded by Waleed Al Ibrahim) and Rotana (owned by Saudi royal Al-Waleed bin Talal) built up a major presence in the kingdom and the broader Arabic-language world by the 2010s, though both came under far greater state control after their owners were detained in the 2017 Ritz Carlton incident. Beyond political constraints, each has struggled to adapt to a changing media landscape increasingly dominated by social media.

MBS and his advisers have leveraged greater state control over these outlets to increase Saudi Arabia’s existing influence over the Arabic-language media market. MBC has expanded its entertainment programming online through the launch of the Shahid streaming platform. The Saudi Research and Media Group (SRMG)—once chaired by King Salman’s sons, and reportedly maintaining close ties to the Saudi state—has formed partnerships with Bloomberg (launching Asharq Business within the new Asharq satellite channel), Billboard (hosting online news about Arabic-language music through Billboard Arabia), and the British newspaper The Independent (Independent Arabia).

SRMG in turn acquired a 51 percent stake in Thmanyah in 2021. Abumalih depicted this move as a way of buying into a media firm that had figured out how to thrive in a fragmented, social-media-heavy communications ecosystem.¹ Furthermore, SRMG and MBC programming can overlap at times—for example, Aljeraisy hosts a companion show to Soqrat on Shahid now called Wa‘d (or “Promise.”)

Close links between media outlets and political authorities naturally raise questions about whether such outlets—podcast or otherwise—can be independent of an official policy agenda. Enough concerns circulated for Abumalih to address the issue of the SRMG takeover in a 2021 episode for Swalif Business, insisting that Thmanyah would retain creative independence while benefiting from SRMG’s standing in the global media business. A few years later, on a podcast hosted by Kuwaiti presenter Faisal Abdulrahman al-Aql, he hinted at Thmanyah-SRMG dynamics in referring to owners who realized that “any interference in [a given company] might ruin it” and that SRMG had an understanding of “the nature of Thmanyah.” Per Thmanyah’s own company handbook, editorial independence is valued not only for its effect on creativity but also as a way of ensuring that the outlet does not “lose credibility” in the eyes of its listeners and viewers.

This balancing act—between prominence and independence—is particularly challenging for Soqrat given Aljeraisy’s open and energetic admiration of, and support for, Vision 2030 and MBS. He met MBS when there was no expectation that the latter would become crown prince, before King Salman ascended to the throne, likely through one of numerous meetings arranged by MBS’s cultural foundation (the Misk Foundation) for entrepreneurs and social media influencers. “Everything I make is . . . to increase the number of believers in Vision 2030,” Aljeraisy noted in a 2022 interview marking Soqrat’s one hundredth episode. Aljeraisy emphasizes that Soqrat is a “documentary program,” not a tool of accountability or a platform for investigative journalism. Still, part of his interview explicitly addresses criticisms that the show is too close to being a public relations exercise for the Saudi state.

Constructive Criticism

Soqrat’s format certainly resembles various media events or complaint lines that nondemocratic regimes employ to offer a pretense of transparency and accountability. For example, Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, an annual television event, shows the Russian president responding live on-air to (carefully selected) concerns—enough, per one study, to boost his approval rating on the margins. Call-in complaints and requests were also an initial feature of Hugo Chávez’s Aló Presidente show, before it developed into more of a pure propaganda vehicle for the Venezuelan leader. The Chinese Communist Party likewise maintains several institutions for what political scientists call “consultative authoritarianism,” ostensibly allowing citizens a sense of participation in policymaking. These practices perhaps explain why the Saudi royal court not only tolerates Soqrat but even encourages high-ranking officials to appear on the show.

Still, Soqrat’s interviews are not straightforward stenography—Aljeraisy does pose audience questions to guests, with viewers left to judge whether officials provide a satisfactory answer or not. The most-viewed section of an interview with Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan, for example, concerned the “painful decision” to increase the value-added tax (VAT) from 5 percent to 15 percent in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Per Aljeraisy, “If you went through the 1,200 questions we received for your visit, you’d find 50 percent of them were on the VAT: ‘When will it decrease?’” Aljeraisy in turn clarified for viewers that Jadaan’s lengthy answer amounted to stating that there was “no expectation to lower the VAT.” Abumalih occasionally hosts similar conversations on Fnjan, albeit as part of a much more diverse rotation of conversations.

Aljeraisy explicitly avoids trying to pin his guests down on tricky questions—a practice sometimes ascribed to television figure Abdullah al-Mudaifer, a presenter on a channel within the Rotana media firm. Instead, the Soqrat host describes the show as a “relaxed environment” for officials to communicate Vision 2030’s policy successes to ordinary citizens. Soqrat’s producers go over the main themes of interviews with guests in advance, and officials’ media relations staff are typically on hand “in case of any errors.” (To be sure, Soqrat’s metaphorically softball approach often extends to political podcasts in democracies as well.)

Instead, Aljeraisy portrays his role as one of helping Saudi officials do a better job of communicating their successes—and warning them about aspects of policymaking they may have overlooked. In a 2019 appearance on Fnjan (before Soqrat was acquired by Thmanyah), for example, Aljeraisy openly discussed “mistakes made” in the initial rollout of Vision 2030—particularly front-loading austerity measures that associated the initiative with belt-tightening and cost-cutting in the minds of citizens. Soqrat’s relationship to the Saudi state thus seems closer to the “ambiguous consultative role” that political scientist Maria Repnikova identifies among some critical journalists in China—providing constructive feedback to state authorities without engaging in overt opposition.

By implication, however, Aljeraisy has suggested that state officials are falling short of the challenge—identified by the crown prince himself—of building support for Vision 2030 when many citizens are too walled off from state agencies to notice specific policy changes. Speaking of those who remain unconvinced by Vision 2030 and its achievements—among them critics of Soqrat—Aljeraisy noted:

“I don’t blame them! There are people who, in their perspective—all of this Vision has no value. For them, [the question is] how much is in my account at the end of the month? How much am I spending? In my personal life, if my income does not increase, and other things in my life don’t improve—this story doesn’t matter to me! Not at all! . . . For this person, no matter what you try to say, you’re a cheerleader [as in uncritically promoting government policies]” (author’s translation).

Appropriately enough for a media figure, Aljeraisy’s hope (as he goes on to discuss) is that better communication strategies can help build support for Vision 2030. From this perspective, officials can and should work to acknowledge short-term pain as part of Vision 2030’s pursuit of longer-term economic gain. Limited criticism of specific government policies might in turn make these narratives more credible. Aljeraisy even referred to “some . . . [who] think that the space for criticism in Saudi media has narrowed” in discussing the role of media outlets in offering “objective” criticism of some state projects.

A Balancing Act

Ultimately, podcasts like Soqrat can neither be dismissed as pure propaganda nor escape the political context in which they operate. If the show were purely an exercise in public relations, for one, it is unlikely that Aljeraisy would joke about having to send out ten invitations to book a single guest on the show. Yet for Aljeraisy, raising citizens’ concerns about Vision 2030 with officials on the show is ultimately more about streamlining the monarchy’s governance rather than contesting top-down governance in the kingdom. As political scientist Martin Dimitrov’s work demonstrates, rulers may in fact value the kind of concerns raised through Soqrat as “voluntarily provided,” providing a more accurate barometer of public opinion (and grievances) than domestic surveillance.

Still, such podcasts offer a limited window into opaque policy processes where few others exist, and they offer a forum for publicly expressing concerns about Vision 2030 where few others are tolerated. If these podcasts ultimately help to secure greater buy-in for an authoritarian political system or build the Saudi monarchy’s reputation for responsiveness without changing underlying political realities, then these are unavoidable realities of a political system that suppresses most forms of public contestation.

Other Saudi media figures have been afforded windows of opportunity to “raise questions” about socioeconomic challenges, only to see their access curtailed and their official support disappear. It remains to be seen how long podcasts like Soqrat or Fnjan—and the few nominally independent Saudi platforms more generally—can keep the balancing act going.