Saudi Arabia's artificial famine in Yemen has been subject to a worldwide media blockade for well over a year.[1][2] This has taken the shape of systematic under-reporting, preposterously low accounts of the death toll - usually treating the hundred of millions of children dead from famine as collateral damage, or avoiding the subject entirely - whitewashing of the motivations of the conflict and obscuring of its trajectory.
As Gary Brecher pointed out earlier this year, it's not that these stories don't sell. Mainstream news media was rife with accounts of starvation in war-torn Syria in years past:
> But the hundreds of thousands of verified, real famine and epidemic cases in Yemen get very little coverage. There’s nothing subtle about why not. The Syrian Sunni jihadis were de facto allies of the US/UK/Saudi/Israel/UAE bloc. So their suffering needed to be amplified. The Shia Yemenis can be slandered with one word: “Iran.” Anything touched by Iran, for Anglo media, is inherently evil, and anything done to those so tainted needs no further justification. The “Houthi,” i.e. the Shia of NW Yemen, are allegedly puppets or proxies for Iran, the Shia Mister Big of journalistic imagination, and therefore legitimate targets for even the nastiest war of extermination (such as by hunger and disease).
Now, at this late date, we have the New York Times's first real reckoning with Saudi Arabia's crimes. Not only that: there's meta-reporting on the story's traffic on Facebook[3], a self-lauding post about the NYT's audacity in shedding light on the tragedy[4], and an op-ed from Bernie Sanders[5]. All in the course of a few days!
What changed?
Consider this rare moment of introspection from the New York Times: "The tragedy in Yemen did not grow out of a natural disaster. It is a slow-motion crisis brought on by leaders of other countries who are willing to tolerate extraordinary suffering by civilians to advance political agendas. And yet somehow the vast catastrophe has failed to catch the world’s attention as much as the murder of a single man, the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul."
From a Saudi standpoint, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Khashoggi's murder. The Saudi Arabian legal system is not codified and has no system of judicial precedent; royal decree trumps the system as a whole (so long as it putatively follows Sharia Law); capital and corporal punishment are both common - beheading and flogging in particular. Freedom of speech and press are anathema.
From a worldwide media standpoint, Khashoggi's kidnapping murder was exceptional. He was one of their own. With his murder, the Saudis broke the devil's bargain they had maintained with worldwide media for years - the one that had (bafflingly) cast MBS as a great reformer and Saudi Arabia as an emerging Silicon Valley of the middle east. The question now is whether this contract can be rehabilitated - and if so, how.
The social dynamics of the reporting on this tragedy should serve as a warning to all of us. Stories like the OP don't get published in a vacuum.
[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/war-nerd-anglo-ameri...
[2] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/11/yemen-having-lost-the-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/business/facebook-blocks-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/reader-center/yemen-photo...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-sa...