When my travelogue about Saudi Arabia was published online last week, some readers were outraged.
They wanted to know why a New York Times travel team had spent so much time and effort in a country whose authoritarian government is guilty of egregious human rights abuses, why the kingdom deserved our attention, and how much the government had paid us for our coverage.
That last question is the easiest to answer: Accepting money (or any other benefit) in exchange for reporting is strictly prohibited by The Times' ethical guidelines. We never do that.
But in the context of Saudi Arabia, readers may be wondering. While covering this story, I learned that the Saudi government and its tourism authorities pay incredibly large amounts of money to online influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to visit the country and share curated, oversimplified accounts of their experiences. These arrangements create incentives to focus on the country's positive aspects and leave out anything that paints a more complex picture. As a result, social media is flooded with flashy, one-sided content from Saudi Arabia. Readers may not be aware of the arrangements that produce that content, because they are often not public.
To my mind, that's one of the things that justifies our exclusive reporting on Saudi Arabia's new tourism projects: The Times is now one of the few outlets where curious readers, and potential visitors to Saudi Arabia, can find balanced travel coverage that acknowledges both the country's major changes and its continuing complexities, including its troubled track record of human rights abuses, religious extremism and oppression of women and LGBTQ people.
Why was this story assigned in the first place? Simply put, because it's newsworthy. Saudi Arabia's $800 billion effort to attract tourists and build a massive secular tourist infrastructure in a relatively short space of time is unparalleled in its ambition. Moreover, it is part of a broader set of goals to reshape the Saudi economy and society as a whole.
We've been hearing about Saudi Arabia's incredible efforts since 2019, when the country first began issuing tourist visas. This year, with the COVID-19 pandemic under control and new tourism destinations coming online, we thought the time was right to take a look at the progress.
For me, that meant taking a 5,200-mile road trip, alone and without middlemen or translators, and reaching out to a broad cross-section of Saudi Arabian society. I wanted my stories to reflect the whole country, not just new construction projects, and to give a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people. To achieve this, I visited several luxury resorts but did not stay at any of them. (Some of them cost well over $1,000 a night, well beyond The Times' expense account limits.) Instead, I slept in communal campgrounds and booked rooms in budget hotels. My lodging costs averaged about $65 a night.
As for whether the kingdom deserves the Times's attention, I would say rather that the kingdom deserves our scrutiny. To me, the word “deserves” implies an element of moral judgment, as if the Times's article were a stamp of approval. And judging whether we morally agree with newsworthy events and the people who caused them is not part of the equation we use to decide what to cover. (By this logic, for example, people who committed atrocities may not “deserve” an obituary, even if they influenced the course of history.)
Ultimately, my job as a travel journalist is not to encourage or discourage people from traveling to Saudi Arabia, nor is it to criticize Saudi society or the tourism industry. My job is to explain, as best I can, what is going on in the country from an informed traveller's perspective, and to provide cultural and historical information to help put the current situation in a broader context.
So I set out to do just that: tell a visually immersive story that I hope will present a fair and balanced portrait of a country undergoing great change.
